London ’98: Funny stuff, less funny stuff and other curiosities By Cathrin Zajber Most of this comedy of situation depends on the reader’s potential of having fun, so you as a reader should be alerted! Our first strange encounter took place 09/06/98 before noon when we looked out of the windows of the coach: broken windows and a dirty wall that might have been white years ago. Immediately the stories told by the veterans of last year’s field trip to London came to my mind: stories of roaches, fungi and black guys with knives, but those tales were revealed as nightmares when I came into the lobby. Our next strange encounter took place 09/06/98 when 131 smelly and drowsy people crowded the stairways between floors 1 to 8 all moaning and groaning because of the suprisingly heavy weight of food supplies (noodles) and alcoholic beverages (Warsteiner 5-litre barrels). But we didn’t go to London on a 13-hour trip to smell the flowery scent of 131 different deodorants. So, while discovering and taking London Town we just could not help but follow this strange magnetism coming from one of those souvenir shops and disclosing our identity as a bunch of tourists, we turned around just before entering the shop and recognized a pauper surging a garbage can for food from the corner of our eyes who was stuck in the garbage can butt first when we turned around again. He looked around for someone getting him out of his misery but had fallen asleep when we left the shop ten minutes later. I figured that I could write the entire report on the poor who I joined by the end of our darn expensive stay in London, especially since there are many questions left open like: Why do these guys look just like me and you? Or, Is sitting-with-a-blanket-on-the-corner-begging a hobby?! Another more or less funny thing was the discussion about youth and bodily conditions with our «English power-curse teacha” Mr. Weinhold. After a short dialogue he finally forbid me to have aching legs because of me just being aged 18 after all. One more adventure called «taking a shower” can be pointed out here: While being locked in the shower for the purpose of getting rid of the London Scum which was also stuck in the nose and getting dressed afterwards a whole crowd of people had found the door to the shower. To avoid this and saving essential breakfast time peeps were just wrapped in huge towels which often lead to accidents on the floors resulting in the loss of those wrappers.? As for taking a shower Sahid should be mentioned who was accused of being a lesbian by a staff member, actually a charwomen, because of waiting for her «girlfriend”. Most adorable were the courageous attemps of Mrs. Haselrieder getting us a guided tour thru the National Gallery via audible contrivances, asking the information lady for cassettes going on with »Do you have them in Germany, too?« Didn’t know she was such a cutie. Testing my memory was also funny when remembering the orders of a whole bunch of people at Mickey D’s. I got ’em to order for themselves by the end of the week. Concerning language I had some trouble myself because those English guys just didn’t seem to get what I was talkin’ ’bout. Running out of inspiration I’m gonna shut up already… P. S.: As to the text – I didn’t aim at grammatical correctness because in my opinion the content of the report did not suggest so. Having spent a couple of month in N. Y. C. I was one of London’s greatest critics at first but found out quickly that London definitely does stand the comparison except maybe for prices, diversity of nationalities and amount of fake Oakleys – couldn’t find one freakin pair in the entire town…! I was proofed wrong in terms of mice, though when a dozen of them crowded the underground track as I had just said that there were many rats and mice in the New York subway. So far, so good… I just made the deadline. Dankascheen und tschuss!

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