Fluent pidgin

Husband and I have just returned from a week’s holiday in Southern Germany, where I occasionally managed to wrestle the laptop from Andrew (by tying him up in the corner with a roll of duct tape). (Only kidding. Really.)

Germany may not be an obvious holiday destination, but I only had a week of outstanding leave to play with and we didn’t want to spend half our holiday at 35000 feet. Our other criteria were flying Emirates so that we could redeem airmiles (I am a junkie), and a fresh climate with not a droplet of humidity in evidence.

The shortlist was swiftly whittled down to Milan or Munich.

Since I’ve had quite enough of Italians after three years working with them, Milan teetered off the bottom of the list . . . which left Munich. And as I pointed out to Andrew, an added benefit of going to Germany is my fluent grasp of the German language.

At least: I can count to twelve; ask where the station is; and confidently assert that this slice of cake is very expensive. According to my German teacher in secondary school, my pronunciation is excellent. [Never mind that she was Irish and never clapped eyes on a genuine handcrafted schnitzel in her life.]

I am sad to report that all my attempts to communicate with the locals in their language of choice were largely met with derision. The first I noticed of it was the hefty waitress in the Biergarten around the corner from our initial lodgings in Munich. Upon my stumbling efforts to request a glass of Pils and a wiener for Andrew, she patiently stood there burgeoning out of her national dress, but as she turned away she SMIRKED.

“Did you see that?” I demanded of Andrew. “That chubster just smirked at me!”

“No honey, I’m sure you’re mistaken,” said Andrew, no doubt entertaining visions of breaking up a catfight amongst the bratwurst.

“Watch her!” I hissed as she returned.

“Danke schon,” I said politely. This time, she actually snorted as she made good her escape.

Another day we were in a restaurant and I tried to order myself a Baileys with ice. The spirit bit was easy enough, but I got stuck on the ice; I couldn’t remember the correct word. So I embarked on an elaborate mime, involving pouring liquid into an imaginary glass and dropping phantom ice-cubes into it with ‘clink! clink! clink!’ sound effects, and the waiter gave me an absolutely filthy look and sneered: “on the rocks?” Complete with American accent.

“Yes please,” I muttered in shame, and slunk off to drown my sorrows with my Baileys on the rocks.

Eventually, I started opening conversations with: “Sprechen Sie English?”

In Munich, this is invariably answered by: “A little bit,” before you are humbled by a dazzling oratory in your own language, complete with iambic pentameter and multi-syllabic words. I sometimes had to ask the natives if they could speak a bit slower.

After a couple of days in Munich we took off driving around Bavaria and I had to rely heavily on my Pidgin German. At least Andrew seemed to appreciate my fumbling attempts to speak Deutsch. After three weeks mocking my ‘German’ as he calls it (along with quotation marks), he was quite happy to let me order food, ask for the bill and argue with all nature of proprietors. He got a terrified look about the eyes when I leave him alone in a restaurant, kind of like a fox surrounded by baying bloodhounds.

On our second day in Munich, we hired bicycles. It’s been about 15 years since last I planked arse on a bike, give or take a year or five. Did I sail gloriously down hills laughing in a carefree manner as the wind tousled my hair, extolling the virtues of Tampax?

Did I heck.

They say: “it’s like riding a bike, you never forget” - well, time to debunk THAT theory. I had some serious wobble going on, especially when taking off up an incline.

It didn’t help that, while I was trying to get to grips with the whole cycling thing, Andrew charged around me in decreasing circles going: “Look! It’s easy!” tring tring! tring tring!

Give him a set of wheels and the man is a menace.

We spent the day trundling around The English Gardens. Andrew had great fun skidding into me, veering across my path or cycling slowly to make me fall off. However, he was frustrated by the fact that everybody was flying past us - in Munich there are special cycle paths built into most of the streets and cyclists all over the place.

Eventually on a sharp downward slope he managed to overtake a little old man on what was not so much a bicycle as a converted Zimmer frame, which made him happy.

I finally managed to cajole him into pausing the whizzing about to sit by a pond and look at some ducks. That didn’t last too long, since Andrew doesn’t see the point of ducks unless you have a gun - so we moved on.

I was astonished to find that there were people lying around the public park in the buff and - even worse - a bloke in a g-string, which is not a good look for anyone at all of any sex. I mean really, in a park where there are innocent children running around, and dogs.

After a couple of days moseying around Munich, we hired a car and explored Bavaria and Austria. We relied on Pensions or Guesthouses for lodgings, and met with mixed success. First night out we were lucky with an Old-Folks Home masquerading as a Guesthouse. Although the hallway smelled like a hospital, it was otherwise lovely; right by a lake, quiet and secluded with a private balcony and en-suite bathroom (we were caught out a couple of times with that little detail - or lack thereof).

Second night we ended up at a place called Feriensee aka Satan’s Armpit. It looked nice on the map; a large body of water surrounded by mountains. We called in to about six Guesthouses where I tried on my fluent Pidgin and all were ‘belegt’, direct translation ‘get stuffed’. We finally came upon a tiny cottage on the outskirts of town where there was a room free in the attic.

There were some pretty profound insects. Much to my bemusement, Andrew felt moved to express himself in dance. After five minutes pirouetting around the room waving his arms in the air, it transpired that he was actually trying to evict a moth. A mosquito met a grisly end with a newspaper - the thing looked like an armadillo on wings. I applied the Newspaper Of Death to a wasp considering its next sting operation in my bed.

Later in the evening, we decided to drive into Feriensee aka Satan’s Armpit and get ourselves some dinner. The first of three restaurants in town had closed their kitchen - at 8pm. We eventually ended up at the Poseidon, a Greek restaurant (I use the term loosely). I ordered garlic bread and Greek bean soup; Andrew a leg of lamb and salad.

The garlic bread was as per the description - bread with slices of raw garlic on top (shame the description was not: “hot buttery garlic bread that doesn’t leave a worrying metallic aftertaste”). My bean soup sported chicken pieces and no substance that could possibly have been identified as beans. Not even little round stools that might have been mistaken for beans. The salad was indigestible, but thankfully we figured that out before attempting to ingest it. Andrew actually managed to work about half the lamb down his esophagus (he was very, very hungry). (It’s a desperate moment when it comes down to Andrew leaving meat on a plate.)

When I complained about the soup, the owner - with a reluctant grasp of rudimentary English - looked pained and shouted:

“It’s GREEK soup.” And shrugged.

The night was shaping up to be a frightener, so we counted ourselves lucky we didn’t get back to the car to find the tires slashed; then discover our attic ransacked and the souvenir steinlagers robbed.

But I tell you, we made a quick getaway the following morning.

We were very impressed with Austria. Mind you, many of the men wear lederhosen, which can sometimes spoil the view.

This being our first real holiday together, Andrew and I discovered that we have widely divergent ideas on what constitutes a Holiday. Oftentimes I clutched my book and gazed wistfully out the passenger window as a park-bench or particularly springy patch of grass flashed past in a blur.

On the noteworthy occasions I persuaded Andrew to pause and watch life go by, he would spend five minutes fiddling with his PDA and then declare he was bored.

He also claimed the sound of cow-bells clanking gently across the slopes drove him up the wall, although he didn’t appear to mind the hire-car’s diesel engine snorting away like a hungry pig.

Even on holiday Andrew obviously likes to feel that he is achieving something. One day, while I sat reading my book in brilliant sunshine at about 1500 metres (bliss!), Andrew yomped up a small Alp. Although he set off at a sprint, he reappeared half an hour later covered in sweat and gasping about how thin the air is - which sounds a lot better than reflecting on the last time he visited the gym.

That was the end of the yomping, although Anderew did haul me off on some of the must-see tourist sights. We visited The Eagle’s Nest, Hitler’s conference centre at the top of a mountain; went up a cable car to the top of the Zugspitz, Germany’s highest mountain at 3400 metres; and visited Schloss Neuschwanstein, Ludwig II’s fairytale castle upon which Disney’s logo is based.

Anyhow, now we’re back in Dubai and of course it feels like the holiday never happened, like we woke up from a particularly pleasant dream to be thrown back into the hurly burly. My work has been crazy busy for the last three months or so, having new projects to handle in Uganda, Kuwait and Iran. It’s such a pill having to actually earn my salary - ptish