Mai 08, 2006

Weekend and The Battle of the Swiss German dialects

Rainy days and Mondays... yes, the rain is back! And it's Monday - of week 8 already! Can't believe it...
But I'll just quickly let you know what I've been up to: On Friday, Olga, Pascal and I went for another curry, now we've finally found a good and friendly restaurant, hoooray! :) "The Curry House" on Castle Road - strongly recommended to anyone visiting Cambridge!
As usual, we had a lot of fun and as the evening was so nice and warm, we decided not to go straight to a pub after the restaurant but sit outside for a while - we ended up sitting on a little wall in front of King's College for about one hour, it was great! Then we went to "our" pub, the Rat&Parrot, but somehow, this was disappointing: now that the university term has started again here, it was absolutely crowded with students who were mostly drunk, it was terribly loud - I could say we weren't that angry when it closed anyway at 11pm... But we were not in the mood to go home, after all it was only 11 and the beginning of the weekend! So we decided to walk home which was quite far and we took another way through parks and different neighbourhoods - it was sooo much fun! Olga tried to teach us some words in Dutch and we taught her some Swiss German (always fighting which was the right word, the one from Zurich or the one from Bern...) and at some point we were talking about the "Hippigspaengstli" and Pascal mentioned the story by Franz Hohler, "S'Totemuegerli" which definitely almost killed us with laughing... When the three of us met again on Saturday, this battle of the dialects continued and it's getting funnier by the moment, so pleeease, if anyone of you can think of some typically Zurich german words which are funny, I'd be more than glad to get them via e-mail, I need to defend myself! :) But how can you argue against someone who writes his description of where in a restaurant he's sitting with "sitze unge hinge links"? ;)
Here's a link to a quite amusing forum for all Swiss people and everyone who's ever wondered how the hell we understand each other; I begin to wonder myself... ;) http://www.hitparade.ch/forum.asp?todo=viewthread&id=7378&pages=
Saturday evening was a lot of fun as well: I went over to Pascal to watch a movie because I really miss watching movies (I don't really have any access to TV at all and if I ever sit in the living room with my host family, the news or something are on - I haven't seen a movie in ages!) and it was Olga's idea that we could watch one together since she had something with her hostparents that evening. We watched "Hitch" which is really a funny movie and afterwards we just talked and "argued" until quite late (late enough that I'm still tired now...), was really a cool evening!
Yesterday, the weather was terrible, I can't describe it in other words, just pouring rain and not just "english rain", but really heavy rain, Olga and I were soaked by the time we reached the city centre on our bikes; therefore we stopped at a Caffe Nero to dry up a little bit before we went on the Fitzwilliam museum - we decided to start doing culture stuff now... ;) The museum was really nice and given the fact that it is free admission, we might even go back there once, they have some nice Monet paintings! ;)
That's it, now we're back at school again...
wish you all a great week!

P.S.: to my dear cousin who's lost her bet and has to speak bern german now: have fun but don't forget which side you HAVE to support in this battle of the dialects! ;)