Thursday 26th June 2008 - Integration, Supporting the Nation & Happy Anniversary Irmscher

It's been a bit longer than I would have hoped since my last blog entry, but due to being thrown here, there and everywhere with work and trying to get some time to be able to put the feet up too it's meant somewhat of a backseat being taken on here for a bit.

As you already know I've been living in Germany since last year, well on the 1st June (almost a month ago now) it was a full year since I made the move out here from Northern Ireland where I had been for the 5 and a bit years previous. So with me now having been living here for almost 13 months it meant that I had to be "integrated" into the country/language/customs a little more than I had been previously, so hopefully the next few paragraphs (and random images) will show you what I mean.

I've had 12 official German lessons now through my company, and it's helped to bring the everyday language skills up the ladder by quite a few rungs, I can now talk crap about plenty of things with one condition - it all has to be done in present tense...for those of you (who like me) have been out of school and the education system in general for quite some years then what that means is when I speak German I do so like "I am doing, what are you doing" etc etc, i.e. present tense. German as a language is heavily more complicated than English in many ways and as such having to learn so many different variations of a single verb can be very confusing until you start to see various patterns which emerge, to give you an example - here's the changes used in present tense for the word "machen" which for us English speakers means "to make", depending on who you are speaking to/about.

ich mache - I make
du machst - You make
er/sie/es macht - He/She/It makes
wir machen - We make
ihr macht - They make
Sie(plural) machen - You (Plural) make

Proper headmelting of the highest order then begins when you find out that not every verb follows the same rules, so
the above is then termed a "regular" verb, where the verb "sein", which means "to be" is irregular, as follows:-

ich bin - I am
du bist - You are
er/sie/es ist - He/She/It is
wir sind - We are
ihr seid - They are
Sie(plural) sind - You (plural) are

So you can already see that whenever the German language (or words to be more precise) were being decided upon they must all have come straight from a 48 hour bender at the local boozer! And it gets worse still as you have to then be able to deal with "strong" verbs which change in certain other ways also...

...and then there's the brain busting madness of die/der/das, which simply explained is what the word "the" in English translates to German as, but 1 option for us and 3 options for our German cousins wouldn't be too hard to deal with either if there was some sense to it as each option just tells you if the object is male, female or an "it", and before you try and jump ahead of yourself it's maybe best to tell you than nothing here even remotely makes sense for what you would term male, female or it, it's simply random answers on a postcard when first learning them until you actually start to memorise some.

So, that hopefully explains why my blogs will continue to be in English for the time being at least (even though I can talk plenty crap now in German), so onto the next stage of my integration into the German way of life - which means I do actually have a team to support in the ongoing EM (european football championships to us normal people out there), so I thought that this would be much better explained via a simple photograph of me in action:-



And these are the people being held directly responsible for my actions!!!!



It's actually great fun to head into one of the pubs in Aachen (chosen by the other half, Mireille), coincidentally which is an Irish pub named "The Guiness House" and can be found just short of the main town square. With quite a large Turkish presence in the area it meant that there were plenty of rival supporters around, and even in the Guiness house itself there was a table of Turks sitting behind us to watch the game.

After the semi-final finished with Germany heading on to play in the final the streets were full of people running about daft, screaming "Deutschland" at the top of their voices while waving huge flags with either their hands or poles half-inched from a local business or garden - great atmosphere and then some as you can see below:-



In other news the latest piece of magazine work that I have done (along with several photographs from Mireille being used also - which I'm over the moon about, as is she) is now in print in Total Vauxhall, namely the coverage of the tuning firm Irmscher's 40th anniversary which was celebrated at the end of April a few hundred km's south of me here in Aachen at their euro HQ in Remshalden, which has now been scanned and put online now too...

Ciao.PREVIOUS BLOG ENTRIES

2008-02-28 - Dr Remington Strikes Again and Life In Germany

2008-02-17 - Have I Just Done A Britney?

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