Out of Office

I'm going on holiday at the end of the week to Berlin. This is a good thing, and it will be fun going round the tourist attractions (The Stasi museum, the Holocaust memorial, the Berlin Wall, the bonfire of puppies, the hundred foot high Benny Hill statue, etc.), but as they insist on being foreign, this means that I've got to get some funny money. Being ever the sensible one, I'm getting Travellers Cheques (it's American Express who have omitted the apostrophe, the sods) to pay for the hostel. They're insured, they're accepted by my hostel, I thought, they sound so useful, convenient, why haven't I bought them every time I've been abroad? What an idiot I've been.

I discovered why I've never bought them before. It's because it's a task that is matched only in its difficulty to complete by the amount of time that it took. I would have thought that the fact that recently I've taken to dressing like a postman (sky-blue short-sleeved shirt, shorts, sandals, satchel, thousand-yard stare) would have meant that they'd've been more willing to help me as a fellow post-facilitator, but did they buggery.

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In preparation for going on holiday I have removed my swiss army knife from my key-ring and left it at home. This means that now I won't get delayed, arrested or otherwise interfered with. More importantly, I won't lose my precious precisious knife, like I do every time I go on a plane. The down side is that I've not been able to open boxes at will, and have had to go to my desk to get a pair of scissors to do the job. Also, I will have increased difficulty with those nylon tags on new clothes, I'm quite sure.

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The hostel we're staying in, and includes a handy guide to Berlin, also handily in English for us dumkopfs. It's even funny:

"GAY AND LESBIAN SECTION; well, that speaks for itself."

"Gay and no into house? That´s what we call a minority. Visit the alternative night at the Schwuz – www.schwuz.de"

Well, it displays a tolerant sense of humour to gays, at least. I sense that all german humour is the kind that were it British would be punctuated always by an exclamation mark! But it's nice to see the effort.