Omphaloskepsis

Friday evening.  When the young and the hopeful throng the streets, eager to notice, to be noticed, to be noteworthy, possibly to be notorious.

There is no better place than outside McDonalds to gauge the pulse of the youth.  To see an entire cross-section of society, or at least a cross-section of one particular section of society that looks mostly the same, except for differences in shirt colour (males) or ability to totter upright convincingly (females).

Like Attenborough with the bats, it's a chance to surreptitiously observe the fashions and interests of a crowd it would probably be fascinating, but impossible, to join.  To see what they get up to.  What drives them.  What they talk about with their peers.  While trying not to show weakness or fear, I cast a glance towards a particularly intriguing group.

It's belly buttons, apparently.  Belly buttons are where it's at.

Business opportunity

Last time I was back home, I was out drinking coffee and drawing, when I suddenly felt more like a house with several bottles of milk and newspapers slowly congregating outside than usual.

I looked up to see a young man, sling-armed and unkempt, standing above me.

It's sort of nice when someone talks to me when I'm out drawing, especially when they make it so obvious where I should punch them before running off if it starts to go badly.  It turned out, he was starting a t-shirt printing business and wondered if I'd like to join in as a supplier of designs.  He looked through my drawings and asked if he could take a picture of one or two on his iPhone.  I couldn't think of a good reason not to at that moment, and I was still trying to work out whether I could get something out of this conversation beyond slightly nervy encouragement.  In the end, I had to take the pictures on the phone anyway, using my preponderance of hands to the full, so if anyone committed a crime against my work it was me.

He showed me some of his pictures.  They were fantastic.  Skulls and the like, but very cool.  "I used to be a graffiti artist," he explained, adding "if you know what I mean", which I had thought I had done before he introduced the doubt.  He asked for my contact details.  I asked for his instead, since I'd be out of the country again soon (or some such irrelevant truth), and said I'd send him an email.

"What did that guy want?" asked my man-on-the-coffee-shop-inside later.  "Seems a nice fella.  Was in last week.  Stoned out of his head."

Looking back, it would probably have been the right thing to nip any suggestions of my participation in the bud from the very beginning, rather than just never sending that email.  But I think that, as a partnership, we probably weren't really compatible, so the ultimate outcome was the right one.

Schillervogel

Alnatura has recently opened up beside me.  Everything there is organic, except possibly for the man in the funny hat doing the greeting at the grand opening, who seemed nice but might well have been synthetic.

I thought this would mean I'd start eating healthily.  Which, given my limited cooking skills and suspicion of misshapen vegetables, means I thought I'd put chickens that had had happier and less drug-addled existences into my fajitas and curries.  Realistically, I'm not going to go into a butcher's and use my clumsy German to utter the names of body parts I wouldn't dare mention elsewhere, so until now I was left with only the suspiciously cheap bits of particularly well-endowed three-breasted birds stocked by Netto.

But it turns out that funding the sort of lavish lifestyles and thorough educations that Alnatura birds have presumably had doesn't make me feel any better.

I do intend to ponder animal rights and ethical eating issues one day, but preferably at a point in my life when I live near a mid-priced organic store.

Frankfurt 3 v Wolfsburg 0 and/or 1

I went to my first German football match last week.

So now I'm a Frankfurt fan.  That seemed the most sensible option.  Approximately 40,000 of the people were Frankfurt fans, with just one miserable sliver of Wolfsburg green nestled in the far corner of the stadium.  Best to stick with the majority, especially when the majority of the majority are drunk, even if they are cheerfully drunk.

And polite.  It's nice for English-tuned ears to hear loud German crowds chanting in entirely non-sinister settings, and the interactions between the announcer and crowd typically went something like this one when Gekas scored:
- Theofanis...
-- GEKAS!
- Frankfurt...
-- THREE!
- Wolfsburg...
-- NIL!
- Thank you!
-- YOU'RE WELCOME!

So they can be polite, even if they'd elbow you out of the way in a queue.  I was impressed that everyone knew, seemingly instinctively, what to shout back.  Although there were suggestions of revisionist history whenever they all stuck stoically to 'nil' for Wolfsburg, even after they had scored.  I didn't approve of that.

But I suppose it shouldn't be surprising, given that their common word for 'history' is the same as for 'story' (Geschichte), and the word that means 'history that really definitely properly happened' (Historie) looks stolen from another language, and doesn't turn up that much in daily life.

Medical Zoo

I walk past this sign most days.

I've not yet felt compelled to visit either the medical clinic or the zoo, but I'm curious.