It’s a Saturday; you’ve had a shitty week, so when you get up and draw the blinds to see that the crisp, sunny weather of the past ten days has been replaced by cold, pissing rain, you can just about summon up the energy to make a cup of tea, redraw the blinds and get back into bed for another couple of hours. Eventually, you’ll stagger to the kitchen, check that there’s just enough food in the fridge to last until Monday morning, then sit down at the computer, delete 109 of the 111 e-mails you’ve received overnight (how do these people know my penis is so small or about the erection problems? And no, I don’t want a genuine replica Rolex – the real ones look gaudy and ostentatious as it is – and what does ‘see the entire Ally McBeal DVD’ mean? Is it only shots of her from the front, because from the side, she’s less than one pixel wide on the screen?), you read a few of the online newspapers, check out a couple of blogs, look at Statcounter and see that even that has succumbed to penis-enhancement advertising, before realising that the phrase “Increase the size of your log!” is actually an invitation to upgrade your membership from the free version I’m using now. Then sit with a cup of frothy, milky coffee chatting to someone you quite like. At some point, the phone will ring and it will be one of your German friends who you arranged to meet over the weekend. She too, will feel that today is far too nasty to go out, but we could “do something tomorrow or on Monday”.
“Surely you’ll be in the office on Monday,” you’ll mention.
“No, it’s October the third” she’ll reply.
You’ll wrack your brain, what kind of Saint’s day or weird religious holiday is October the 3rd?
“Is it the ascension of St. Francis of Assisi’s dog and only applies in Landkreis Calw?” you’ll ask.
“No, Re-unification day”.
Oh. Dear. The bendy carrot, half a pint of milk and a Danone noir extra chocolate pudding with a best before date of Sep 27th, suddenly don’t look like they’re going to provide quite enough sustenance until Tuesday morning.
It’s not that I don’t know that 03.Okt.1990 is the official date of re-unification, but rather that I still think of the fall of the Berlin Wall as being the real day, not 11 months later, and I’ll never get used to the fact that all the shops are closed on Bank Holidays. Even the odd baker that begrudgingly condones to open for an hour and a half on Sunday morning stays shut. So I had to walk in that pissing rain to the only shop which was still open, which was, oh joy heaped upon joy, Lidl, a shop so bad that I normally cross the street so as not to have to walk past its entrance.
I’m so used to the idea of British Bank Holidays, which are always on a Monday and when the shops are open anyway, that this “could fall on any day of the week”, “not applicable in all Bundesländer” malarkey, gets me every time, so could you please make public information films to warn foreigners and run them after the Tagesschau? Please.
German Word For Today: “Mauer” - Wall
Song playing as this was published: Stairsailor - “Music Was Saved”
Even I as a German never really got the hang of all those stupid holidays. I was fine with the political ones or easy stuff like Allerheiligen (easy because it’s on the first of a month), but all the bloody religious ones caught me off-guard every time.
Right now, I seem to be having the same thing in reverse, though. Three weeks into a year in Britain and I find myself checking the fridge on a Saturday morning to see whether it’ll last until Monday, only to realise that it doesn’t matter because the shitty Morrisons (a fifteen-minute walk away on top of everything, but inexplicably the only supermarket that can be reached without resorting to transportation other than your feet) is open on Sundays, just like everything else in this country.
Monday is Happy Helmut Holiday……and I have to work
But Its wierd how like last year HHH was at the weekend. What’s the point of having a public holiday on a weekend, espcially a Sunday?
Stefan: Yes, yes it might be morrissons but it is open on a Sunday. Please don’t tell me it’s open 24 hours a day, or I’ll cry. And yes I know Morrissons isn’t so great, but Lidl seems to have had their store layout designed by someone who went for the “recently looted” look.
Haddock: Now I’m self-employed it makes bugger-all difference, but when I actually worked for someone else, I loved it when they fell on a Thursday, you could have the Friday as a holiday and have a four-day weekend. I think it was in Spiegel that I read that on such Fridays over 50% of workers took the day off or were “sick”.
Oct 3 sneaks up on me *every* year, it seems, even though I’ve been through it 14 times already. We managed to remember to get enough food to make it through until Tuesday though.
I don’t know what you have against poor Lidl - ours is very spiffy with Mexican food and sushi and such.
christina: Obviously, I need to take photos.You have a Lidl with Sushi? Jeez! I did buy some of the horsey products they had on Angebot a week or two ago, but generally the staff scare me. I’m not even mentionining the other customers. Or that it’s directly opposite to “Almost Normal Supermarket GmbH”.
some of the horsey products
Not as in meat?
Top blogging recently btw Herr Actual Factual. Agreed that the holiday should come on the wall opening day. That’s when the proper action happened.
Mark: Damned fine sausage!
Actually they were selling those mineral stones for horses to lick - €1.99 for a 2kg block which worked out at about 8 times cheaper than what my sister pays in Britain. As the horsey set probably isn’t Lidl’s top demographic in its inner city stores, I lugged a bunch of them home and she can swap them for 10kg of the food produce for which our nation is so justly famed on her next visit.
Thanks for the compliment by the way - and I haven’t even started on the Tony Hancock posts yet!