Is a difficult word to pronounce if you have trouble with the letter R. So here are my plans for the next few days:
Tomorrow, crack of dawn, get train to Manchester Airport and fly to Stuttgart, arrive there pleasantly early in afternoon, find hotel (shouldn't be too difficult, even with my sense of direction, it's just over the road from the train station), see sights. I've been to Stuttgart before, a couple of times, but I'm sure the sights have changed a bit since last time.
Saturday, find University of Stuttgart (also right next to hotel and train station) and memorise small amounts of numbers, cards etc in a no-pressure kind of way, safe in the knowledge that my scores won't be counted because I'm not South German. Note to self - avoid wearing lederhosen, just in case someone mistakes me for a South German and publishes my terrible scores for the world to see. Also avoid making lederhosen-themed jokes in case they offend genuine South Germans. Then after competition, beetle off back to the airport, fly to Berlin, get a train to Magdeburg, get an S-Bahn to Barleben, find hotel (quite some way from the train station and it'll be dark by then - this is the point where the schedule might go wrong), go to sleep.
Sunday, be ferried back into Magdeburg by Mental Calculations World Cup organisers (hotels, meals, guided tours etc are all free of charge for competitors, as always), pose for photo, then try to remember how to do mental calculations. I haven't calculated anything mentally since 2006, so my hopes aren't high for lifting the World Cup for England.
Monday, more of the same.
Tuesday, get away from Barleben/Magdeburg in time to see the sights of Berlin, a city I've never once visited despite all my millions of trips to Germany, then fly back to London (because that was cheaper than Manchester, not to mention Birmingham which is much easier for me to get to and from by train but fails to provide any reasonably-priced flights on the days I want to fly to and from there). Get home probably late at night due to unexpected delays, go to bed just in time to get up for work on Wednesday. If I didn't find this kind of thing so much fun, I'd drop dead from mental exhaustion and stress.
3 comments:
Good luck!
"Lederhosen" istn't typical in the South of Germany. It is associated with Bavaria. But Stuttgart lies in Swabia in Baden-Wuerttemberg. The probably most widesprwad cliché about the Swabians is, that they're penny-pinching. You could also link them with spaetzle. And the adjacent Baden call them "Sauschwob" but I wouldn't suggest you to call someone "Sauschwob". ^^
It's a little bit pity that I moved to North Germany and participated there this year. Wouldn't I have been moved, I could have met you at the South while participating and "watch" the world master in action. But certainly there will be another possibility for that in future. :)
good luck dude!
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