photo by flicker user tmivy/Tracie Ivy

For almost a week now, the whole of Hamburg has been a fairground, with rollercoasters, big wheels and all the trimmings.

Okay, that’s a slight exaggeration; but we are talking about a part of the city so big that it kind of gives you that impression. The “Heiligengeistfeld” – also the name of the legendary St. Pauli FC football stadium next-door – is about half a mile long and several hundred yards wide. That makes it big enough to be served by two underground stops – one at each end. Which is a good job, really, since, until the last week of August, the area will be overrun with thrill-seeking teenagers and tourists, as well as the odd local adrenalin addict, like myself.

After having taken a look at the Hermannsdenkmal last week, I stayed overnight in Detmold, the nearest town. It’s a small, provincial place which, despite its exceptionally well-preserved old centre and attractive castle, has never quite made it into the big leagues of German day-trip destinations. That honour seems – in terms of medieval cities – to be have been reserved for Lübeck, Münster and Bamberg.

Yet, as I found out, the Detmolders are not disheartened, and are making a concerted effort to use the attention that the two-thousandth anniversary of the gigantic Varusschlacht – you know, the one from the start of Gladiator –has focused on the area to try and parley their neat little old-town into a big tourist attraction.

If you talk to German literature students about a chap called “Hermann”, you’ll realise that Germany has a problem with heroes.

Whenever Great Britain gets into trouble, for example, there’s a sleeping King Arthur hiding out somewhere in Cornwall who will come to the rescue; and when he doesn’t show up, Churchill will fill in for a few years.
Or when America isn’t doing so well, everyone remembers how George Washington beat impossible odds – and the British – to found the world’s leading democracy. And when more is needed, they elect Barack Obama.
And France, despite the concerns of its neighbours, is still quite happy to honour Napoleon and charge visitors a few Euros to see his final resting place in les Invalides.

Every time I hear “Moin moin” in the streets of Hamburg, I start to reflect about regional dialects. Okay, not every time: but often. You see, as a child growing up in London, I quickly learnt that accents from other parts of the United Kingdom were to be understood either as signs of below-average intelligence or as a misguided attempt at comedy. After all, nobody really wanted to speak like that, did they?

There were, for example, arguments when the first regional accents appeared on the BBC Radio News in the 1990s. Until that time, the media had allowed non-standard English no more than a few soap operas where all the characters were supposed to be uneducated and/or of morally reprehensible conduct anyway.

The mission was simple. Five people, fifteen of the cheapest beers we could find, and a blind taste test. It was a cheap beer taste test because we were broke, and since we were almost always broke, we considered ourselves something of cheap beer experts. The good, the bad, and the ugly – all tested in the Land of Plentiful Beer.

So it started with a scramble to gather up all the empty bottles and cans since the last venture into beer consumption so that we could take them back to the grocery store for “Pfand”. (Pfand=bottle return money) Three people, three sacks of bottles, three stores. We’d procrastinated with the shopping until it was too late to get to the really, really cheap grocery stores (Plus, Aldi, and Lidl, for example), so we went to Rewe, Tenglemann, and most importantly (though deceivingly expensive) the gas station. We ended up with about 13 euros and 15 beers.

In the course my research as an English freelance journalist living in Germany, I seem to gather an ever-growing assortment of bizarre facts of the kind that only a… well, only an English freelance journalist living in Germany could ever really find a use for.

One example is the relative concentration of open-air bathing facilities in Great Britain and Germany. I researched this for a video I made about how superb German outdoor swimming pools are. Here, I felt that I needed to offer some concrete figures about the superiority of German bathing in order to show my viewers that there was a justification for doing the story beyond me fancying a free afternoon’s swimming.