This came as rather a surprise to me, but i have for the first time in my life become a season ticket holder at a football club. The team in question is FC St. Pauli, some sort of (self-described) socialist football club with a penchant for skull and cross bones / piratantical merchandising. Going to the games is quite relaxing, especially as i’m not particular caught up in who wins or loses. Heretical no doubt, but pretty much true. It’s just a nice couple of hours out drinking beer, and people watching.
Working at home, this is one of my rare opportunities to get out and ‘integrate’ with the locals. Integration is very big in Germany, and despite my deep seated antipathy, it seems it is a sensible thing to do. Thus far nobody in my row has bothered (dared?) to attempt to strike up a conversation with the oddly bearded, some what detached, newcomer. Eventually curiosity will get the the better of them and then within weeks i’ll be speaking perfect (working class) german.
Well, that’s the plan.
The other day my landlord remarked on my ‘Hanseatic’ germany pronunciation. This is, i came to understand, shorthand for ‘sounds like an upper class twit’, which means that perhaps my attempts to integrate on the football terrace might not proceed so smoothly…
I think it is less an upper class twit in the English sense, but a diction that resembles language spoken by the bourgeois merchants, teh true Hanseaten. Merit, not upper class incest
.
Nevertheless it’s not really compatible with socialist Pauli.
I shall hope for tolerance… or keep quiet!
You will be assimilated.
That’s the plan… not entirely sure how it’ll go, but it is a start.
LOL…..that’s what you sound like in English too
Can’t wait to see you rioting on the front page of The Spiegel.
the sub-header is going to be awesome, ‘plumy sounding englishman sparks riot on terraces’ … but in german.