Whose Voice is it Anyway?

I think that most English speakers find dubbed versions of films and TV quite amusing to watch, and I often wonder if the full character can come across, like the southern gun specialist in CSI:Miami would it be better to give her a strong local dialect in dubbing rather than Hochdeutsch?  Something I that hadn't occurred to me was brought to my attention a few days ago.

I turned on the telly and a film was playing, the well known main actor was dubbed, Uwe had his back to the telly doing something on the computer.  The actor spoke and Uwe immediately said "Oooh Bill Murray!" I of course asked him if he had seen the film before, which he hadn't so I asked him how he knew who it was before looking, by his voice of course.  Now I am sure this is obvious to everyone else but I really hadn't thought that an actor would be dubbed by the same voice over artist for everything they do.  It reminded me of a story I heard a year or so ago about the death of Princess Diana, something crazy like 3000 look-alikes woke up to find themselves without a job.  I suppose it's not a case of "oh thank god Bill's got a new film contract, I can eat this year!" but they must do other acting jobs and put on other voices for different actor's.

Anyway here is a clip of Ghostbusters dubbed in German for your enjoyment!

It's Life Jim, Almost But Not Quite As We Know It!

I admit to being somewhat naive when I first visited Germany, I suppose I thought that we were such close neighbours and relations that most things would be the same as there are back on the Island.  I can put this down to my not being well travelled at all, in fact I had only ever been to France three times, the last of which was when I was 12 and to Amsterdam for a few long weekends. I was 23 when I flew for the first time and with my trips to Germany I have more than doubled my lifetime flying in less than two years.

Things aren't massively different, even the words sound quite similar, but different nonetheless. Over the past three weeks there hasn't been a day when when one of us has enquired along the lines of "You do it that way in Germany?" or "You don't do it that way in England?"

Some of it may be seen as old fashioned by some, but myself I am quite pleased that Germany holds onto some values which have been long forgotten back home.  Here - as I know other bloggers have noted - Sundays are still rest days, the shops except for bakers are closed which means time to do other much funner things instead. 

Supermarkets are smaller and fresh produce is much more seasonal.  In my local Sainsbury's most of the fridges were taken up with ready meals but here I haven't spotted even one that compares, in fact I remember joking with a colleague a few years ago about potatoes not being muddy any more like when I was a child, I am pleased to report the veg here not only has evidence of coming from fields but is also in naturally occurring un-regimented sizes.

The food itself is of course quite different and Junk Food is not quite as widely available, for example back home I could log onto JustEat.co.uk and order anything to be delivered to my door within 45 minutes, or to Sainsbury's for delivery the next day which just isn't possible to do here.  Which is good for me as I did far too much of that through my depressed non leaving house days and as a result have had to join WeightWatchers to work it off.  Now I have rediscovered the joy of cooking along with discovering for the first time the familiarly alien art of German cuisine, if you're interested in any of that you can check out my other blog Slimming in a Foreign Land.

On Monday I opened a Bank Account here, which I was surprised to hear would cost me a monthly fee on top of the cash machine fees which we don't pay in the UK unless it is one of those privately owned extortion machines.  However the most astonishing thing for me was when Uwe informed me he had made an appointment with his "guy at the bank" which I know used to exist in England before everything got centralised and shifted to massive call centres in Newcastle or New Delhi.

I have to say that a lot of things aren't necessarily better or worse over here or there just different, and I generally like how things are done here. I find the only really annoying thing is that most content on Youtube is blocked because of GEMA, but I can reliably tell you that pisses off the Germans just as much.

My First Festivals

The past weekend has been a packed one, Friday and Saturday evening was spent in the company of Uwe's friends two of whom were celebrating birthdays and Saturday itself was spent doing my second German oral exam and driving about doing some furniture shopping.  We finally found a suitable Schriebtisch in an amusingly named store called Hofmeisters, which of course meant I had to bring up the old "all Germans are obsessed with the Hoff" chestnut.  Which in itself is quite topical as the Hoff himself believes he is the one solely responsible for toppling the Berlin Wall, and today is a bank holiday in Germany commemorating the reunification.  To be fair he did have a pretty flashy jacket on when he played on the Berlin Wall back in 1989.

Yesterday we visited the Pumpkin Festival in Ludwigsburg, I have been itching to visit since we went to the Blühendes Barock in July 2010, that day was in the middle of a summer heatwave and it was about 36°C, absolutely scorching! I had seen a leaflet for the Pumpkin Festival and thought it looked amazing in a kitschy surreal kind of way, and the bonus is that being held in Autumn it would be a much more reasonable temperature (unless, like this year, it happens to be a freakishly hot heatwave when it should be about 12°C, but is instead 26°C!!).  I had read the lovely Laurel's post on last years festival and last week she posted her review of this years and with this theme being Dinosaurs I knew I had to see it for myself!

The place was absolutely rammed with visitors, it was hard to take pictures because of how many people were there, and even in the areas of the vast Gardens which were not pumpkinified one could hardly move.

That's right Pumpkinosaurs!!

The Pumpkinasaurus Rex was my fave.

After looking around for a while we were delighted to see a hut selling ice lollies, but as we approached the counter they closed, so instead I took a picture of an amusingly named icy German treat:

Just to prove my sense of humour has not moved on much since I was a toddler...

Something I found even more amusing than Dinosaurs made from Pumpkins and an Ice Lolly called Bum Bum, was the children's entertainment area, no bouncy castles or noisy fairground type attractions needed here! Pop up a wooden hut area, cordon it off and add some bails of hay and let the kids chuck it at each other, brilliant!  It looked really fun and I was tempted to join in :D

I wouldn't want to be the one cleaning up after that!

After a tip off from Laurel we sat down for some refreshments and I had some of the Pumpkin wine, which does sound wrong but is in fact very, very right!  I promptly visited the shop and bought a bottle to take home, which sadly I have already finished while catching up with the last two weekends of X Factor.  I did want to bring home some of the wonderful varieties of Pumpkins on offer, but towards the end I was so hit I couldn't be bothered to queue up again but I did take some nice pictures.

Sure to make someone some lovely soup one day.

Originally I had pencilled in the Göppingen Weinfest for Sunday, but I decided to let fate decide - okay the people on Facebook - and oddly enough they chose Pumpkins.  However i had forgotten that it was a Bank Holiday and we could do both, so to honour the people who had voted in my Poll we did that on Sunday and today we visited the final day of the Weinfest. I had my first taste of Zwiebelkuchen, which is a quiche-type thing but instead of pastry the case is a savoury sponge cake kind of affair.  It was a gorgeous day drinking cold wines in the Sun accompanied by a live Volksmusik band, perfect!

Bizzler!!

I had been hoping to find some Federweißer as recommended by the delightful Frau Dietz but we were out of luck, talking of luck the Frau herself has an exam coming up so send her some happy thoughts!

GOOD LUCK FRAU DIETZ!!

Finding my Feet

Well I have been here for 10 days now, I would love to tell you that I have done so much, but unfortunately after I arrived and my body realised the stress had disappeared, it decided to let a cold in instead.  I knew it was a good buy picking up extra Lemsips at the airport.  I passed the cold onto Uwe where it mutated into Man-Flu, and as such we didn't get too much done except visit the supermarket a few times, but at least my belongings arrived in one piece.

The view from the supermarket car park is somewhat nicer than that of Tescos in Milton Keynes!

I had my final oral assessment for L193 and got stage fright so not really anticipating a good result there lol.  It only lasted two minutes and consisted mainly of me saying "erm" and "wie, bitte?" which bummed me a bit because as soon as it was over I knew exactly what to say :( I have the L130 assessment tomorrow morning and this one is longer and a group session, I have decided there is no point worrying about it though, what will be , will be.

Uwe went back to work on Wednesday, and I haven't had the confidence to get out on my own yet, but tomorrow we are going to take the bus into town together so that I am familiar with where I am supposed to get off and not get lost, and my Monday challenge is to go buy some groceries.

We have friends birthdays to go to both tonight and tomorrow night which should be fun.

Ich bin hier!!

Well on a very rainy, very English, Tuesday afternoon Uwe and I got on a plane at Birmingham International.  We arrived in Stuttgart a cuplr of hours later and even though it is nearly October it was over 20 degrees at 8pm and hotter than the entire summer in England this year!

Uwe's parents picked us up from the airport and we went back to dinner at their house, where his mother had prepared my favourite Swabian dish of Maultaschen with Kartoffelnsalat accompianied by copious amounts of local white wine.   I was sufficiently tipsy enough to even speak some very bad German, about the above weather situation - no I don't need a passport for someone to tell my nationality - which everyone was suitably impressed with, or at least they seemed to be through my wine goggles.

View from outside the Bürgeramt

Yesterday we headed to the Bürgeramt to register my residency here.  The only bit I understood was really when she asked Uwe if I understood German, lol.  So far so good, but it still doesn't seem quite real yet.

Stresssssssed....

Oh God >.< The hellish few days of nasty stomach bug and sleep depriving migraines have certainly not helped anything, but I did get out the house today for a long walk and a nice lunch with my Mum.

At least I have a passport and I have sorted all the bills and other tedious phonecalls that have had to be made, going to drink a glass of wine, watch something silly and try to relax tonight and then tomorrow I am going to be a whirlwind of industrialism around here!

Time for a small update...

Well it is just under 5 weeks until I move and I have made a start on things, I have been furiously been copying CDs to my PC so that I can sell my collection at the car boot, I really hadn't realised how big my collection was! I estimate it at about 400, so even if I sell them all for 25p each that would be a nice sum.  I still need to sort through my books and I have a mountain of shredding that needs to be done, I could probably keep a hamster in a home for 3 years =P

In other news I got my result for U211 and I managed a Pass 2, which is brilliant for someone that had thoughts of giving up right at the start, so I am feeling quite proud of myself for even making it to the end let alone getting such a good grade, and I wasn't that far off a distinction!  My new course books have arrived for E301: The Art of English which is all about the creativity in the English we use everyday as well as in the more traditional literary sense. The assignment booklet won't be available until the beginning of September but I have looked at last years and they don't look so scary, fingers crossed for this year too then :)

Also a letter turned up yesterday from the Council and my German evening class tutor has nominated me for an Adult Continuing Education learner award! No idea what that actually is but I get to go to an awards ceremony about 10 days before I leave, how exciting!!

Anyways that is it for now, I may write again before I leave but if I remain quiet I hope you'll forgive me :)