Sunday, 4 May
=========
Aye-oh, let's go
-------------
We arrived en masse at the hotel about 17:00, which is right next to the Kaiser Friedrich Wilhelm Memorial Church and got straight to work as per usual, packing meeting packs, sticking signs up and familiarising ourselves with the meeting room layout. The usual pony-tailed/bearded/be-sandled suspects were already milling about the reception, laptops under arms, waiting for their buddies to descend.
Welcome to the Hotel Pa-aaalace
---------------------------
The hotel has had a huge new wing built onto one side of it, and some idiot architect neglected to add any lifts to the new part. So, you end up wandering around in circles and squares and bloody octagons down thousands of corridors that all look suspiciously similar. Every time I try to find my room I get the song "Hotel California" in my head, specifically that line "You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave...". With every corner I turn, I keep expecting to see that scary kid from The Shining cycling down the corridor on his tricycle.
Wo ist mein kase schnitzel bitte?
-------------------------
By about 19:30, I was deliriously, and annoyingly, hungry and muttering to myself about finding a kase schnitzel and scoffing more kartoffelen than most of Ireland in a whole year. There was a huge group of people going off to some grill house, so a few of us formed a break-away republic, split from the mainland and slunk off to a good old fashioned CHERMAN restaurant. I was desperate for cheese schnitzel; fried cheese, baked cheese, sorteed cheese, raw cheese, old cheese, any kind of bloody cheese actually, but I was out of luck. The only cheesiness on the menu was deep-fried camenbert (bleeeurgh! Tastes like old socks after a hard day's shopping) but, as I was desperate, I even ate some of that. I ordered cold, pickled, fried herring which arrived on the table, headless but with a tail which I swiftly removed from my sight and then felt instantly better, and smothered in fried potatoes. Mmmmmm. I washed down this fine CHERMAN cuisine with a massive tankard of fine CHERMAN Warsteiner beer.
Bitte Bitte Bitte ( I just like saying it)
-----------------------------
Everyone seemed to be a bit knackered after this huge chew-fest and so we ended up back in the hotel bar. When we found out that a beer cost almost 6 Euros, we quickly legged it next door to the Irish bar, which was full of drunken old, red faced CHERMANS dancing to the cheesy tunes the live band, which had a collective age of about 890, were playing. We bumped into Franz and Erik, the geeklings, in there. The ceiling was mirrored and the boys discovered that you could see down the ladies' tops by staring at the ceiling. Ah. Those boys.
Rubbery jubberly
--------------
We all trotted off to bed an hour or so later. I thought about checking my e-mail, but when I saw that one a one hour connection costs a whoppingly shocking EUR 10 per hour, I thought better of it and watched the measly depression a.k.a news on BBC world. My bed is huge. MASSIVE. Imagine my disappointment when I excitedly dived in and found that there is a bloody sweaty rubber sheet on the mattress! I mean what's that all about? However, since my enormous bed has two enormous duvets, I broke all rules of hotel protocol and shoved one between me and the mattress. The nest was prepared in one small corner of the bed. I still slept like crap though because the room was like a sauna. The thermostat read 26.5 degrees this morning and no matter how long I keep the airco on, or how long I leave the window open, it doesn't get any cooler. I reckon that it's a cunningly cunning ploy from the hotel to make you excessively warm, and therefore excessively thirsty, and therefore excessively stupid enough to pay an excessively ridiculous price, such as 5 euros, for a 200ml bottle of water from the excessively overpriced and understocked mini bar.
Monday, 5 May
======
The meeting started today and I seem to have been so busy I can't actually remember what I did, all I know was that I didn't stop until I got to the Hippo House in the Berlin Zoo at about 19:00. More about that later.
Jabber-itch syndrome
------------------
Today I was monitoring Jabber during one of the sessions. For those who don't know, this enables people to participate in the event, by using chatrooms, if they cannot actually get to the venue. They type their question, the Jabber monitor gets up and reads it out to the presenter. We broadcast all the sessions live on the Internet. The seat for the person monitoring the Jabber is located right next to one of the microphones. When someone in the room wants to make a comment, they stand up at a microphone and the cameras zoom in on him...or very rarely her...or sometimes a him/her he/she hybrid... but that's pretty unusual.... What this means is that the person monitoring Jabber is smack bang in the line of camera fire. Why is it that I get an uncontrollable urge to pull stupid faces/readjust my underwear/pull out my eyelashes one by one etc. whenever someone is standing at the microphone and being broadcast live over the Internet? On this day, horror of all HORRORS, I suddenly developed an uncontrollable itch and ended up scratching like a dog with a bad case fleas. Once the itch on my shoulder stopped, it started again on my knee, or my foot, or my back. Argh, I think I need help. Or at least some itch-relief.
Hungry Hippos
------------
So after a full day, we legged it off, late, to the evening's social at the hippo house in the Berlin Zoo. Yes. You read correctly this time and the time before: those crazy CHERMANS organised a partaaay in the zoo. Hippos are cool. I want one. I don't care if they weigh 3 tonnes and could bite me in half with one lazy chomp; they are SO CUTE with their little ears and their big hairy noses. I want one. He could live on my balcony. Oh, if only he'd fit on it. The keepers threw the Hippos slices of bread and shot water cannons at them for their dinner. I never knew hippos liked bread. I mean it's not really the sort of thing they find out in the wild is it? So after all the hippo-ey excitement, I realised what a bizarre situation it was: there we were glugging fine wine and CHERMAN beer and scoffing posh snacks, while some girl played lift music on a piano in the corner, while behind 20 cm thick glass, 6 hippos were providing 300 geeks, er and me, with entertainment. Poor hippo-tjes :(.
Knut-ter
--------
Then someone said, "Did you see Knut?" Knut was the little polar bear that was rejected by his mother when he was born and hand-reared by the zoo keepers. He caused mass hysteria in CHERMANY, mainly because there's not much else going on here, but also because some militant animal activists sent him death threats and said that he should be murdered because, in the wild, he'd die anyway. After seeing that poor bear in his enclosure, so desperately miserable, I am inclined to agree with them. The poor little bear, who is actually not very little anymore, just wanted some company. At one point he put his head on his giant paws and looked at us with such a look of complete and utter forlorn-ness that I wanted to cry.
LGS + CCCC
-----------
We decided to go and get some food, but there is always the LGS (large group syndrome) problem and the CCCC (coveted company credit card) problem when you travel with work. The former refers to the annoyingly arduous and complex task of trying to do anything or go anywhere in a group of more than about 6 people. The latter refers to the fact that everyone tries to huddle close to the colleague who is in possession of a CCCC. This means that you don't have to fill in a bothersome expense claim form when you get home. Hurrrah. Anyway, after much to-ing and fro-ing, and hushed whispering, and raised eyebrows, and head jerks, and hiding around corners and in bushes, another small breakaway republic was formed and we went to get some food. Ok, so I lied about the hiding in bushes and around corners bit, but you get the idea.
Sake-tastic
---------
We decided on Japanese food. I was a bit worried about this, since the $Sushi_Incident_TM (when I had a bit of a nightmare with sushi being ejected, almost whole, from my stomach rather rapidly and violently a few months ago). But, when we got there, I was relieved to see that it was a Teppanyaki restaurant, which was a good thing in general, but I forgot how bloody long it takes. It was 22:00 when we arrived there, and after an hour or so of faffing and knife-chucking-about, we finally got to eat.
Suse offends the entire country of Japan with one small chopstick
---------------------------------------------------
It was hot in the restaurant and my hair was annoying me, so I took a spare chopstick and wound up my hair in it out of the way. A few moments later, a waiter ran up to me and told me to take it out, like, NOW. I was a bit startled and said, sorry, I wasn't going to use it to eat. He repeated himself and then said, "This is a JAPANESE restaurant..." ...um, like I didn't know? "Das Macht NIET" (excuse lousy CHERMAN spelling, I just wrote "dat mag niet" in Dutch with what I think is a CHERMAN inflection). Yikes. I thought he was going to samurai-sword me into tiny bits and elaborately fry me on the hotplate there and then, or at least poke me in the eye with a sharpened chopstick. So I duly removed the offending chopstick from my hair and rethought my trip to Tokyo next month. Then I remembered something I read about never leaving your chopsticks sticking up vertically in a bowl of rice because it resembles something that the Japanese do for dead relatives. CRAP. I've managed to insult everyone in the restaurant within the first two minutes of entering. Nice one. Then I thought, hold on hold on, my chopstick was horizontal in my hair and I am pretty sure that my head does not look anything like a bowl of rice. Hmmm.
Hermaphrodite bear
----------------
Halfway through the meal, which I must say, was pretty amazing, I noticed the scariest statue of a bear I have ever seen. There are statues of bears everywhere in Berlin but this one was the weirdest thing I have ever seen. It was twice as tall as me and was wearing a sombrero, which is pretty weird to start with. It's face was all lop-sided and twisted in some sort of agony, like some naughty little boy had just shoved a burning firework up its rear-end or something. As if this wasn't enough, I noticed that this bear had some boobs. Aha! A LADY bear. Then I looked further down and realised, WHOA, THAT AIN'T NO LADY BEAR! So, there was a bizarre statue of a giant hermaphrodite bear, wearing a sombrero, watching over me while I munched on my noodles. How bizarre.
Sky-high geeks
-------------
So, I've just arrived home after the Sky-high party, which was, er, high in the sky, and have caught up on the last two day's worth of blog material. Tuesday passed without much excitement, unless you count the moment where one of les fromages grandes got very angry with someone in the audience who tried to interrupt him and shouted very loudly down the microphone. Magic. Ah. How exciting these meetings are :). More tomorrow. I'm off to the rubber nest now...
No comments:
Post a Comment