It was a great holiday, but...... the night a racoon broke into our tent and attacked us will live on in my memories.
... coming down a dirttrack mountain road with no fences with the back end of the car fishtailing about left me needing new underwear.
I'm off on holiday next week somewhere nice and safe. Tell us your holiday stories.
(
rob, Thu 21 Apr 2005, 9:55)
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Timing is everything...Me and my best mate Mike decided during the summer hols from Uni to visit his parents who, at the time, lived in Alicante. Now my Dad's old army regiment were at the time stationed in Berlin, so we figured "2 birds with one stone" and all that, and decided to spend a couple of days in (pre-Wall coming down) Berlin before carrying on down to Spain.
Setting aside for the moment the monumental diversion we had to take to get to Berlin in the first place, off we set. I had some basic 'tourist German', but Mike only knew one phrase: "Meine Beutelmaus hat verstoppfung", which translates as "My wombat has constipation." Remember that phrase...
So - 7am on an East German train just leaving the Hook of Holland and now heading through the 'transport corridor' that let western folk travel overland to the hedonistic sinpots of Berlin, starving hungry as only two students can be, we decide to leave our compartment to look for some sort of breakfast/diner car. Wandering down narrow aisles, just wide enough for one person to walk down. Up ahead, i spot a uniformed chap walking towards us. "Ah!" thinks I. "Must be the guard..." Then I notice he has a sidearm, in a holster...which he is unbuckling...and looking very stern.
I presume he thought we may be East Germans attempting to defect, as he blocked the corridor, one hand on his luger, growling something to us that I basically figured out meant "Get the fuck back in your compartment before I shoot you."
It was at this point that Mike decided to demonstarte his grasp of German by leaning over my shoulder and saying in his best German accent "Meine Beutelmaus hat verstoppfung..." Well, it certainly shut the border police-army-gun-toter up. I swear that phrase just MIGHT have saved our lives!
Ok, maybe not, but it still makes me giggle to this day, over 20 years later. And he's still my best mate (Mike, not the guard - that would be weird.)
Apologies for lack of length, but I always figure that staying power is just as important anyway.
(, Fri 22 Apr 2005, 13:36, Reply)
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