Whenever people ask about my life in Bavaria, my answers never quite seem to give the full story. That is, my life there comes out seeming either amazing, or truly, truly awful. So here, I am going to try to recount the actual stories of the Bavarian Forest.
The beginning – September 2013
I arrived, after a horrendously long journey from Cologne, to be met at the station (it was really a shed with train tracks) by a man who looked kinda like an angry guinea-pig. As we drove to my new abode, he explained that my flat wasn’t actually in the big town where the school was, but a hamlet, called something which translates as ‘under the grape river’. I remember being remarkably positive, but surely my fruit-related home should have been the first warning.
My landlady lived in the same house as me. A quite sweet but a little senile old lady, who only spoke Bavarian German, was to look after me, a clueless and also senile English girl who spoke no form of German. When my parents came to stay, they asked me why I spoke so loudly when I tried to speak German. ‘You sound quite angry’, they said.
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| Sunset in the Forest |
As I heaved my belongings up the stairs, I noticed my phone had no signal. ‘Do you have Internet?’ I enquired. The landlady (her name was Fanny, by the way) looked appalled and confused. I tried to ignore the first fissons of panic. Good. No phone signal and no internet.
We passed another door on the stairs, and I asked if other people lived here. On receiving a positive answer, I began to cheer again. Later that evening, the man who picked me up from the station (he was supposed to be my mentor) took me out for dinner with the headmaster of the other school I was going to be working at. They fed me weird vinegary salad and beer and Bavarian schnapps. Another teacher (HP his name was, more on this dude to follow) arrived later, to jokes from the other two teachers about his lateness being due to ‘having to keep his wife warm’. I went home feeling both the alcohol, and a sinking feeling that these teachers were not the friendliest of their kind in Bavaria.
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