The Horn Blower

I like to try to find a quiet place to watch football.  I wasn't really designed for unrestrained celebration, and I never feel (and have never felt) quite caught up enough in the moment to shriek or dance or wail or swear whenever there is a goal.  Mostly I just smile (irrespective of the scorer), or laugh a little if someone does something particularly amusing.

That's why I prefer to watch the main matches in Perkeo.  There are some other people there, but not usually too many.  So it's possible to watch in company, but without needing to think too much about displaying conspicuously less enthusiasm than everyone else.

When Germany played England it was particularly perfect.  One could do almost anything (or nothing at all) without being noticed, because there were already two unbeatable distractions: the football itself, and the elderly lady with the horn.

She is the only one who stood up for the national anthems, because she was the only one to show the appropriate respect.  I wasn't quite sure who she was rooting for, since the flag in her hair was German, her accent was American, and she applauded with apparent royalist vigour after 'God Save The Queen'.

At the start of the match, she mostly just sat with her wine and horn positioned on the table in front of her, in a teasing semblance of normality that everyone knew would be broken at some point, but no one was sure when.

It was really only when Germany scored that her loyalties became clear.  I'd never heard an elderly lady toot the German anthem out of a horn before.  I didn't know it could go on so long.  Nor, I think, did the older man who received it directly in his face.  At least, his look of nervous, fearful embarassment suggested it was new for him.

Means of Transport

While walking everywhere, I've noticed a propensity among Germans to find any alternative to relying upon feet alone.  The following is a short inventory of representatives of various modes of transport that I have seen since coming here:

The Skateboarder

I like the skateboarders close to Bismarkplatz because they are resilient.

Twice in six months have I seen one of them flip his board and land on it again, rather than land just beside it with a frustrated grunt, or fail to effect any sort of flipping at all.

We were all so shocked on those two occasions when it worked that I don't think any of us knew what to do.

I pretended not to notice in case clapping would have seemed sarcastic.

The Swivel-Boarder

I tried to draw this after seeing one at a great distance.

As far as I could tell, by gyrating his body he was able to propel himself in a perpendicular direction.

It looks a bit like surfing, which goes to show that a lot of the coolness of surfing originates from the water.

The Scooter

When I first saw her scooting past me while I was on my way to work, I remember thinking to myself that it looked quite silly for a fully-grown woman to be on a scooter, and I wondered why she did it.

By the time I had finished verbalising this thought in the privacy of my mind, she was at the end of the street and I was still grumpily lumbering along.

Particularly good for someone with one energetic leg, and one strong, but lazy, leg.

The Unicyclist

Apparently these were all the rage in Heidelberg for a while.

Not outrageously practical, but not bad.  This typically looks slower than other options, except when one is about to fall off, when it can be very fast.

(It seems that whether one actually is moving in the desired direction of motion or quite the opposite at any given moment on a unicycle can only be calculated probabilistically - but the experienced unicyclist usually gets there in the end, albeit after more peddling than was strictly necessary.)

The Cyclist I: The Arm Folder

What happens when ordinary cycling is practiced by the extraordinary.
For when a loss of control and a considerable amount of extra wobbling is deemed an acceptable price to pay for a look of skill and forced nonchalance.

The Cyclist II: The Promiscuous Leg

The most widespread of all the 'looks', and simultaneously my most and least favourite.
It is ideal for opponents of symmetry, or anyone with only one presentable leg.

Back in Germany

So I came back to Germany in January - as you probably know if you are reading this, since if you are reading this you probably know me (and will hopefully at least have noticed you haven't seen me in a while), and if you don't know me you probably aren't reading this (although if this applies to you, then clearly you are reading it, but I just don't know it).

Anyhow, I decided not to write on this more extended trip to Heidelberg.  But it turns out that, given time and freedom and a whole new country in which to do anything, I still don't do a lot.  So I'm starting again, in a slightly different and considerably reduced way, and adding it here rather than cluttering up some other part of the digital universe.

Admittedly, a large part of the inspiration is that I started some German writing (which, as yet, has both a confirmed readership, and potential counting error, of one) in order to get some more language practice.  I wondered if Google Translator could make it comprehensible in English.  It could not.  One or both of Google Translator and I aren't very good at German and/or English.  So I'll translate it or, more accurately, rewrite it here using a refreshingly less taxing language.

There are more pictures this time because, always wishing to line up birds like skittles so that I might knock down as many as possible with the fewest stones of effort, I'm trying to incorporate my drawing practice, executed in Heidelberg's coffee houses and restaurants and mostly inspired by whoever I happen to have seen on the street.

Hello.