Top 3 breaking up songs:
Jeff Buckley - Last Goodbye
Mazzy Star - Fade into you
Led Zeppelin - Babe I'm gonna leave you (alternatively Ramble on)

Single in June
Jobless in September
Homeless as of Today.

The downward spiral continues... :)

OK. So now there's no turning back. Just got my ticket.
Frankfurt-Bangkok on the 9th November
Bangkok-Sydney on the 12th February
Sydney-Auckland on the 4th March
Auckland-Santiago de Chile on the 27th April
Rio de Janiero-London on the 29th July
Gulp.

I think I might spend Christmas here
Anyone else?

German for beginners

Knusprig: Means "crunchy", "crispy". This is an inherent quality that all german foodstuff products must have. Breakfast cereals must be very knusprig. Snack bars (Twix, Kitkat etc.) must definitely be knusprig. Fruit & Vegetables must be very fresh and delightfully knusprig. The highest quality a fried potato can have is, you guessed it, knusprigness. Bread rolls are knusprig on sunday morning, as are the mozzerella sticks you get in the mexican restaurant. Oh and of course the duck from your local chinese restaurant must have the ultimate knusper effect.

Just look at the results in Google. The first 20 hits describe Frozen pizza, Duck (x2), Trout, Cornflakes, Lamb, Beef, Bread rolls, Hyperlinks, Crisps, Bread, Children's crackers; Salmon (Crunchy salmon ???), Goose & waffles...

Profi: Means "professional". This is also an ultimate goal of all germans - to be a Profi in some area of life or another. So you have football profis, bicycle profis (radprofi), internet profis, plumbing profis, sex profis etc. etc. In the case of a sporting profession, then the word is correct, but for the other areas it really means "they know their shit" (excuse the french). But that doesn't cut it ("er kennt sich gut aus"), they need to be a PROFI!

Once again Google sheds some light on the phenomenon: Reference profis, agriculture profis, profi guides, profi statistics, call centre profis, battery profis (!), model building profis (!!), you have profi search settings (only for profi internet users), stockmarket profis, tyre profis, sales profis, house building profis (with the tantalising promise of "you too can become a house building profi!" and my favourite Bus profis

Quereinsteiger: Means someone who has studied or worked at something and then goes on to work in a completely different area. I.e. you study medicine and go on to program computers, or you are a sailor and go on to become a management trainer. This is extremely alien to the german way of thinking (das geht nicht) and therefore a word had to be invented for this predominately foreign (germans just don't do it) concept. It is a word which is normally whispered at polite dinner parties: "This is Peter who now works with us" (turns to side and whispers "he is a quereinsteiger"), the others raise their eyebrows and treats Peter as if he had Leprosy.

Paying for two drinks with two bank notes: Especially common in student towns. Person goes to bar and orders two drinks. Barman says 4.80 Euros please. Drink buyer says "I want to pay for the coke with the 20 Euro note and the jasmine tea with the 50 Euro note please". Yes, you guessed it, the drinks are for different people who want to pay with their own money. The fact that that the other person is going to go and buy the same drinks again in 30 minutes is seemingly lost on them (please compare and make notes to the Irish / Anglo saxon "Round system").

Zusammen oder getrennt: (Together or seperately). Very closely linked to "Paying for two drinks with two bank notes" this is the question that poor german waiters have to ask guests when they want to pay the bill. The answer (in my experience) is normally 75% getrennt, which means that the waiter then has to ask all the guests what they had to eat / drink / smoke. We know this wouldn't work in most other countries, as people tend to forget if they had 7 or 9 beers. But the germans all sit patiently there (even of groups of 10+ people) and recite what they had. This habit is obviously derived from the german's non-belief in Karma. The fact that what goes around might just come around again is lost on them all.

Zug: "Draught". This has been commented upon in 45 million other books so I will not further enlighten you. Suffice to say that in Germany, a draught is somewhere between full body cancer and mass-murder in the ranks of evilness and non-desirability. Given the choice of sitting in a draughty room full of drugs and naked, sex hungry nymphomaniacs or having all limbs amputated and thrown to the crocodiles, your average german would of course go for the latter without a second's thought.

Kreislaufprobleme: "Circulation problems". See above.

Da Hit
We're talking 'bout objects: animals, minerals or vegetables
Ringin' the alarm clock, octopuses tenticles
Talkin' da nonsense - better known as common sense
Not gettin into no accidents, nevermind yo' ignorance
Making it catchy like itchy & scratchy.

Passed my driving test with flying colours. Suddenly feel much older...

Frankfurt, Germany.

Shall I tell you about my life?

Or so, at least, goes the into of "Man of the World" by Fleetwood Mac and in celebration of those famous words and to break a long standing tradition here, I actually will.

I arrived in Frankfurt, bright eyed and bushy tailed in the autumn of '98, after having lived in Cologne for a year. A new IT project was starting, something which sounded slightly exciting, a little unknown and defintely new. Within 6 months the little IT project was finished, installed and working quite nicely for the client.
But the little project didn't want to stay little and soon the project was rapidly developing into a product and I was being transformed from a project leader / software architect into a product manager. More and more companies heard of the product and wanted to buy it. Damn them!
By the end of the millenium we had 3 clients (all in Germany), by the end of the 2001 we had a total of 10 clients (now also in London, Luxembourg and Zurich) and I was racking up frequent flyer miles like they were going out of fashion. 2 Years later and the total is somewhere in the low 20's, with clients now online in Frankfurt, Munich, Cologne, Luxembourg, London, Zurich, Paris, Madrid and Dublin (that was a great feeling, getting your first client in your home town...).
In the meantime minor things had happened like changing offices 6 times, my team growing from 4 to 15 people, part of the company going bust, other parts being founded in Paris and Zurich and the economy going belly up.
Fast times (hey it was the New Economy) but, unlike most, I never suffered the bad hangover the next morning. In fact the product is going from strength to strength. Sounds great huh? Actually it was, but then again, just like during a night of heavy drinking you have to know when to call it a night, otherwise you are going to wake up the next morning stinking, unable to do anything and screaming for an Alka-Selzer.
Choosing the right time is an art in itself: toss a a coin, go to an astrologer, talk to your parents, ask your partner, check the stockmarket, pluck a flower...

I had it easier: I broke up with my girlfriend.

So after 5 years relationship, 5 years Frankfurt, Version 5 of the Product (no shit), and a night of bacchanalian excesses with my oldest friend, I decided to Quit (yeah, with a capital Q).

While basking in the glow of knowing that it was THE RIGHT DECISION (TM) and while chewing on an Alka-Selzer the daunting question WHAT NEXT (R) was solved as if my brain had decided to do some background processing while I slept, the answer was of course not 42, but rather to go on a Round the World Trip.

Planned route: S.E. Asia (Nepal, Thailand, Vietnam, Laos), Australia, New Zealand, South America
Time: Anywhere between 3 months and "until the money runs out", most likely 6-9 months.
And afterwards? I would love to know. I can neither tell you what I want to do afterwards, nor where I want to do it... Travel author (yeah, I know I need practise after piss-poor efforts like this) in Barcelona, Music producer in Stockholm, IT Guru in St. Petersburg?? Answers on a postcard please to the usual address.

3 months later (yeah, German Arbeitsgesetze don't aid speedy getaways), most of my worldly possessions have been sold on eBay (everything from a Squash racquet to a couple of video cables), the apartment is rented on, my arm is riddled with vaccination holes and I have been generally having a wonderful time...

Highlights thus far:

• Cultured Pearls concert in Bielefeld


• Breakfast, Boat-rides and Beer on the Bosphorus


• Being directed to the only gay turkish baths in Istanbul with a (male) friend. Scary is not the word.


• Ending up in Budapest after having rented a car in Vienna and planning to go to Bratislava, but missing the right motorway exit


• Vienna nightlife - I will never be the same...


• Gentleman concert at the Loreley...


• 2 rather hazy days and nights in Luxembourg


• Learning to drive, or at least attempting


• Loosing lots of cash at the Casino in Wiesbaden (yeah, a highlight!)


• Driving on two wheels after I drove up an embankment at a test driving track


• Finding out that Unemployment is underrated

Thanks to:
Zero 7, Jeff Buckley, Goldfrapp, Led Zeppelin, Placebo, Coldplay, Bob Marley,
Nick Hornby "High Fidelity", Alain de Botton "The Art of Travel", Lonely Planet Thailand, New Zealand, South America, Mil Millington "Things My Girlfriend and I Have Argued About", Herman Hesse "Steppenwolf"
Becks (and especially the nice guys @ the BP petrol station that are open til 22:00 and sell it to me with a wink), Power P, Maultaschen, eBay, the oh-so-friendly post office in Karstadt,
John x 2, Stefan, Nikolai, Ollie, Erick, Andreas, Christine, Mikael, Federica, Eleanor, Ulf, Adriano, Christian, Rene, Ralf, Rüdiger, Richard, Jan, Johann, Shura, Popovich (and all the other citizens of the former USSR who graced my roof ;) )
and all the rest, you know who you are!

I must give back my company laptop tomorrow, so I will be severed from the e-mainland. I guess there are some Internet cafes in Frankfurt, so either the next post will be made sitting beside some spotty-faced teenager (although I am used to that after the humiliation of being a 30 year old in driving school), or will be sitting with a beer in Kathmandu, Bangkok or Hanoi.

Oh well, whatever ... nevermind, see you round,
A.

Save this one for Friday night.

Something for the weekend sir?
Vibroracers
Female soccer fan
Every man's dream
The future of Google
10 technologies that deserve to die