Gavan Reilly's Portfolio writings, ramblings, mumblings

Culture Shock #8 – in which our hero hits the high notes… but more cheaply

They say that one of the beauties of being on exchange in continental Europe – especially in a town like Passau, nestled between three central European countries – is the freedom it affords to travel around and see more of this mysterious Europe we live in. What most people don’t mention when they say it is that transport between European cities, in the absence of a local Ryanair or EasyJet, is often prohibitively expensive and unless you can spot a cheap train abroad (suffice to say, rare in Germany) and book it months in advance, getting around isn’t quite as easy as one might like. Throw in the fact that the place is so damn cheap that one can drastically overspend with appalling ease and it becomes just short of impossible.

What many people never seem to notice, though, is that a hidden gem in living in Europe – hey, even a hidden gem in living anywhere away from greater Dublin – is that bands who may have already made it big at home or in America have a little more difficulty making a name for themselves outside the English-speaking world. Hence, countries like Germany often play host to artists, often ones who have had a multitude of chart-toppers back home, playing gigs trying to worm their away into local affections. And… well, yeah, you’ve guessed my main point. Germany is no Ireland, and Kartenhaus is no Ticketmaster: concerts are damn cheap over here.

Take Razorlight, who by the time you read this, will be preparing to play the RDS next Tuesday. Before ticketmaster.ie sold out for the gig, you’d have expected to pay €44.20 on top of the distinctly unmissed handling and booking fees. Contrast this to the three Belfield girls I’m deployed in Passau with, who late last month saw the same gig in Munich for €19. Now whether you think that this is still too high a price to pay to deal with Johnny Borrell’s gangling semi-nudity for ninety minutes or not, it’s difficult to argue against how favourable it ends up when you’re seeing a band with six hit singles in a venue smaller than the Student Bar (with the shutters down), at a gig that didn’t even sell out, for less than half the price you’d pay to see them in a glorified school hall in Dublin where you could be half the length of the concourse away from the front row. Whatever you think yourself, I’m sold, and when next you read me I’ll have been to the same venue to see The Fratellis. I’ll save you the anguish of knowing how cheap the ticket was. Suffice it to say, it was €17.

But yet, native Germans, despite their standard-issue impeccable level of English, don’t seem to really grasp how well they have it. Tune into RTL (think of it as TV3 without a weatherman who looks like he’s running for a County Council seat) on Saturday evening and you get to feast your eyes on a double-bill of Deutschland Sucht Ein Superstar: Pop Idol with two evil judges. And you wonder where Germans earned this reputation of being evil?…

Bis bald,
Gav

Culture Shock #7 – in which our hero wonders why all Germans aren’t on dialysis

So here we are again, another year, another batch of deadline-scraping annals of an Erasmus life in deepest Bavaria for my loyal readers – all four of you – to muse over on every second Tuesday. Here’s hoping that your exam results, if they’ve miraculously appeared by now as due, flattered your workload, no matter how great or small that was.

The greatest thing that strikes you when returning to Ireland after spending a few months in somewhere like Germany, especially being an elder brother to a sulky 14-year-old obsessed with the idea of getting his hands on a can of Heineken, is the otherworldly difference in attitudes to alcohol that prevails between the lands. It’s, frankly, mind-boggling.

Passau, I might add, is at the present time in the throws of a major facelift involving a large chunk of the town’s pedestrian centre, near where I live, being flattened and rebuilt with huge glassy spires and bus terminals that look like petrol station forecourts (no, seriously: it wasn’t until I had a visitor in the first week back who supposed at its real use). Hence the town is swathed with builders, who unlike their Irish counterparts don’t drink tea, and work from 8am to 6pm or as long as daylight will allow.

Oh, and the other thing? Inside every builder’s van in Passau are crates of Löwenbrauerei Weissbier – the local brewery’s finest white beer. And for the hour that the builders do take off lunch, they do nothing but drink it. Not that it’s unusual here either: anyone who did Junior Cert German may have had their teacher explain that some angry Germans once brought a high-profile employer to court because their beer machines had been removed from their office canteen, and won the right to drink on the job.

A traditional Bavarian breakfast consists of Weisswurst (a light coloured sausage, usually pork) and Weissbier – and to all intents doesn’t differ much from a Full Irish other than the beer is mandatory. The legal drinking age is 16; as a result, even in the superclubs of Berlin, there is no ID culture. You can have a beer with your lunch in a McDonalds; you can even have a beer with your lunch in a college restaurant. No kidding: Passau’s Mensa offers a bottle of local brew for €1.05 – and 15c of this is the government levy on glass bottles which you can have refunded at the till. That’s right, kids, 90c for a bottle of beer to enjoy at college. And yet, despite the unconditional acceptance of alcohol in society here, there’s never a single mention of alcohol being involved in a car crash and the only times you see someone slumped over after a heavy day is at Oktoberfest.

Compare and contrast that to tarted-up 17-year-olds bickering with a bouncer about their ID in Temple Bar in New Year’s Eve and you have a quite perplexed columnist.

Prost,
Gav

Culture Shock #6 – in which our hero thinks Christmassy

You know how you always feel like Christmas is coming the first time you see the Coca-Cola ad on TV? Or the first time you hear Fairytale Of New York or the Penney’s ad on the radio? And you know how every year they get earlier, and privately you long for the olden days when the Christmas run-up actually started with Advent and you longed to be allowed open one of your Cadbury’s Selection Boxes a few days early, just because it had been a whole year since your last Curly-Wurly?

Well, it seems that the concept of Christmas shopping the day after Halloween isn’t just an Irish thing. In Passau over the last few weeks little garden hut-style booths have been mushrooming on the streets? and at the time of writing (two weeks ago by the time you read this) they’re already selling Glühwein (mulled wine), and Weihnachtlebrötchen, which are little dry slices of Christmas cake. Christmas shopping season seems to begin on November 11th. Grafton Street has seen nothing like it.

Of course, it being this time of year – and this being the last o2 before the holidays (what odds that the Coca-Cola ad is already on TV?) – the dreaded exams loom at large and frankly I’m doing well if you’ve read this far into my ramblings before going back to the library to swot up on sociological theory or something. As much as I’d love to gloat – ha, no Christmas exams, hahaha, oh how lucky we are! – revenge is a dish best served cold and by the time you’re being slaughtered with Union election propaganda in February I’ll be doing my exams for the end of Semester 1.

It’s the time of year, though, when home comforts begin to take on an added luxury. Suddenly simple things like a box of Lyons teabags, a copy of Q or the new Ross O’Carroll-Kelly (whoever invented care packages is nothing short of superhuman) gain the respect that they?re probably always deserving of. The playful splash of water hitting teabag or the cheerful guffaw brought on by the word ‘roysh’ garnish a new sparkle and the old adage becomes true – you really don?t know what you’ve got until it?s gone.

So I guess it’s the right time to say that if you’ve read this far then I applaud your patience; good luck with the exams, and enjoy your Christmas, whether you still think the Selection Box is as magical as before or not. Stay safe, and see you in 2007. Now run along, ?cos that coursework ain’t gonna learn itself.

Fröhe Weihnachten,
Gav

Culture Shock #5 – in which our hero is shocked by Salzburg, Berlin and… Dublin?!

Excuse me for probably seeming a bit groggy but since the last time you caught me things have been just a little bit mad in the Life of Reilly. Recollection will be a challenge, just try and bare with me.

First there was a weekend in Berlin for a fellow Belfieldite’s 21st. As if the sheer concept of spending a weekend in the company of seven other Irish people who are literally just there for a party wasn’t lunacy in itself, throw in the fact that my InterCity trains travelled a combined distance of 1494km to get me there and back, and the hapless transport guidance of a ninth Irish person meaning that five trams were taken between two stations on the same line, and the weekend becomes a 1600km trek the length of a country (or two, depending on whether you live before 1989 or not). Add copious amounts of Becks – €2 a bottle, what a country, and a large helping of sambuca (€10… wow) and weekends get messy. How messy? Well, messier than a box set of International Rules games on DVD. Now that’s messy. There are no plush, Dublin-style nightclubs in Berlin; they’re all rather shabby, as if you’re going to a house party being held in a parish hall, with cheap alcohol and cheaper sofas out the back where the air conditioning actually works, by virtue of ‘out back’ being outside.

Anyway, once my emergency passport managed to weasel its way back to my postbox, I decided there were few better ways to celebrate being legitimately Irish again than to return to Dublin for a few days. A quick consultation on Ryanair.com advised me that Salzburg offered a cheapo flight over, and ultimately I arrived, knackered but content, in Austria, getting a street tram thing to the airport. Salzburg, it should be said, has nothing else of note right now (other than heavy advertising for its bid for the Winter Olympics in 2014) aside from its trams. They don’t have rails, they’re buses. Except they’re powered by overhead cables. The tram drivers are busdrivers required to drive directly underneath a power cable ALL the time. Imagine the fun to be had by drunk-driving Austrian busdrivers…

Long story short, I eventually arrived, even more knackered and even more content, in Dublin Airport, and arrived to the general surprised amusement of assorted hacks down Observer way. What do I see as I arrive? People photocopying their arses outside the SU Office. So much for Culture Shock, meine Freunden, some things never change…

Bis bald,
Gav

Culture Shock #4 – in which our hero learns the true nature of German bureaucracy

Now you might think, reading this at the cusp of November, that any well-thinking citizen would have registered at their University a good month-and-a-half ago. Well, before I go on, I should point out that the first semester in German colleges runs from mid-October to mid-February – with a pathetic two weeks off for Christmas – and the second from mid-April to mid-July. The whole process of registering, therefore, doesn’t end up taking place until early October, with any time before that reserved for the intensive language courses that the five of us (that’s The Passaunators?) have gone to very little of. You’d think it’s simple enough – simply bring a passport photo, a form filled out, the official letter accepting you to the Uni, your Leaving Cert results (I know, but they don’t trust the disparity between colleges around the world) and some proof of health insurance.

Easy, right? Well, yes, if you had a passport. But, in case you missed it last time, I spent my last day at Oktoberfest genuinely sober – and managed to lose it from my jacket. Uh-oh.

After an awkward encounter with a local cop to get a police declaration of my passport’s loss, and many more mumbling phonecalls to the city Fundbüro (lost and found office), I eventually had to swallow my pride and tell my sorry tale to the nice folks at the Embassy in Berlin. The phone attendant did his best to sound understanding (while still smirking at the ”sober” boy who lost his passport at Oktoberfest) and ran through the replacement options with me, telling me he would send the prerequisite forms to me to be received the next morning. If I sent them back in time with all the details supplied, I could have a temporary passport returned to me within five days. Result, right?

Well, it woulda been – had the forms ever arrived. A week later and my postbox was still empty. Frantically I phoned Berlin again. ”Really? We posted them that day. We’ll send more.” This time there was no problem – they arrived, as promised, the next day. So I zipped around, having my photos witnessed by the Erasmus Co-ordinator, all the usuals – and sent the envelope back the same day, paying €8 for the DHL-provided privilege of nextday delivery.

That was a week ago today. There’s still nothing in my postbox.

Imagine my immense shock and delight, then, when the unshaven and scruffy Irish boy shows up with a semi-completed application form on the final day of enrolment, without a passport, the declaration of its loss (still in Embassy hands, I can only assume), my Leaving Cert results – lost in a bureaucratic mountain in Athlone – or even the green letter inviting me to the University. I entered the office hoping to blag myself a few days’ grace, and seven minutes later left as a fully registered student of the Universität Passau. In short, German bureaucracy? It seems the Irish are far, far worse than the Germans are.

When next you hear from me I’ll have been to Berlin. But ’til then…

Auf wiedersehen,
Gav

Culture Shock #3 – in which our hero fests Oktober and enters diplomatic limbo

So what else do I know about Passau? Well, the town was diplomatically flattened in 1663 and rebuilt by Italian architects specially commissioned from Venice. As a result there’s lots of old cobbled pedestrian lanes and arches all over the place, and at this time of year when the weather is still mild and in the low twenties, the town centre looks genuinely stunning. The skies are a pristine blue, the buildings are various shades of sandy gold and the hills (no kidding, they’re actually Austria – the hills are alive with the sound of musiiiiic!) are rolling, lush and verdant. It’s a sight to behold; or at least, it is right now. This time next month it will be proper Winter and the town will have a metre of snow, while the hills above will be subject to eight feet of it or more. I also know that Passau is home to a frivilously decorated railway station marking the border stop on the main line from Munich to Vienna, and is a two-hour railroad away from the former. There are worse ways to get to Oktoberfest than pay €25 for a five-person travel ticket valid for all of Bavaria.

Oktoberfest is, in a word, madness. It’s even more of a sight to behold than Passau is. There are endless amounts of übermarquees, and brigades of four-foot women wearing breast-crushing Dirndls (again, think The Sound Of Music) carrying several times their own body weight in Maß (one litre) tankard glasses. Trust me, the average punter can lift no more than one per hand. These people are actually known to inject themselves with cocktails of steroids and concrete. Anyway, to make a long story short, we got up at 6am, fare-dodged on the most packed tube train in history, got a table outside a tent, met some Italians, had some spillages, were tipsy by noon, ate some Bratwurst, met up with some of the other Erasmus heads from Aachen, and had a cracking time (despite the old guy who sat beside us on the last train home and was obsessed with licking Carla’s toes while she slept. Don’t ask). We immediately resolved to go back the next weekend.

So return we did, and, well, to be honest, it was pretty much exactly the same as first time, except we booked a room for an overnight (yes, that’s A room – a double room, for five people) and managed to swipe six of the Maß glasses as souvenirs of our weekend. Of course, there’s always a catch of some sort on days like that, and on our last day at the Fest – the one day I wasn’t drinking, and instead sampling more of the food around the place. At some point I arbitrarily put my hand back to the inside pocket of my jacket and… yes, you’ve guessed it – no more passport. Uh-oh. There’s a diplomatic nightmare on my hands, but needs long explanation so it can wait ’til next time.

For now, I’ll just tell you that Carla, Sandy, Clem and Neil – and our five similarly named goldfish – send their regards, and we’ll catch you again soon. Stay tuned for more diplomatic news…

Tschuß,
Gav

Culture Shock #2

First published in The University Observer, October 3rd 2006 (Day of German Unity)

So… what do I know about Passau? Well, I know that it has a population of 50,000 and is about the size of Athlone; that it’s home to a University of about 8000; that it was once in Austria, although that’s not a shock given that you can clearly see Austria from the front of the Uni; that it’s home to the world’s largest pipe organ – don’t ask; and that there is no single shop in the entire town that stocks a UK-European plug adapter.

I also know that because it’s in Bavaria and confronted with ausländer on a daily basis – whether from Austria or just the Erasmus types – there’s a certain Corkonian or Basque air of regional superiority to be found with a certain hardheaded breed of the natives. Bayern Munich fans, for instance, are generally despised around the rest of Germany because of their pompous arrogance when on away trips to other grounds. We had our first brush with one of these local blue-blood types on our train from Munich airport to Passau itself. Not long after hearing the five of us (the other four do, by the way, send their love to one and all) spark up a conversation in English, he turned to his Bavarian mates and began to mutter, in an ungodly thick local accent, about how these ausländer should be speaking German if they’re going to come over with a load of suitcases, obviously for an extended trip. So what do the Irish guys do, when confronted with their nationality in such a manner?

Ding ding, you’ve guessed it. We started chatting as Gaeilge, and by throwing in some expertly inappropriate French phrases too – how could ”re-lisez les instructions pour la Section A” possibly be relevant? – we had our beer-swigging acquaintance convinced that we were from some Celtic-speaking region in Brittany. And yes, I do mean beer-swigging, although there was substantial wine involved too: apparently alcohol is fair game on public transport, although perhaps it was just because the train was from a Munich in the grip of Oktoberfest. Strangely though, one of us was berated by a local busdriver for taking out a mobile phone while on board. You get the feeling that, as Ron Weasley once nearly said, this country needs to sort out its priorities.

Anyhoo, this cybercafe has eaten almost all of my coinage now so I must sign off. The next time you hear from me, I’ll have been to Oktoberfest. Just, er, watch this space. Wink wink!

Rites of Passage in UCD

There is a moment in every UCD student’s career when he or she will realise that they are a fully-fledged, battle-weary Belfieldite. Reminiscing of a time when catching the 10 into down cost just €1.40, Gav Reilly examines some of the milestones we all pass along the way…

1. You can’t return a UCD missed call
Anyone attending UCD will inevitably be sitting on the 46A with their earphones in and their music too loud when getting a call from one of the trillions of extensions within UCD. Equally, anyone already attending UCD will have had that moment where they check the number, see 7160000, and hit the green button to call them back. If you miss a UCD call, never mind. If they really want you, they’ll leave a voicemail or call again later – as anyone who’s heard, “Hello, main switch” and been berated for trying to return their call will tell you.

2. You’ll have a rebellious phase
You’ll probably, nay you will, undergo a phase where you realise that yes, the world really is unfair and that yes, there probably are better ways for countries to be run. You’ll also have a single moment where you appoint yourself as the chief ambassador for this radical new ideology, only to realise that eventually your coursework will require more of your time anyway, and that by going to college you’re unlikely to revert to the McJob you’re trying to abolish.

3. The best laid plans of mice and men…
In UCD there is absolutely no guarantee that any plan will actually come through. Ask anybody who’s ever arranged some time to actually study, anyone who’s ever tried to run a society event, or anyone who’s planned to go for ‘just one pint’. A side issue for this one: always bring some etra cash, because going for one drink means going for one session, and going outside the bar to go to an ATM is realistically only the preserve of (i) smokers and (ii) robots who have been programmed without any comprehension of the concept of windy UCD weather.

4. You’ll pass a module in two days
Everyone throughout their stay at UCD will have one of those courses they’re just not naturally predisposed to (microeconomics, Germany after WWII, biological structure of Peig Sayers’ sixth cat, etc etc). You’ll also end up scoffing coffee – that’s powdered coffee, you won’t have time for frivolities like water – and rifling through the textbook you’d never opened before, bluffing your way through the exam and coming out with a better score than the weird studious guy in the front corner of every tutorial. You’ll realise you could potentially do your degree in four months too, but be too scared to actually try it out for real.

5. You’ll grow to love the place. Maybe
You will, of course, have some cynical periods where you wish you’d spent another year of your life travelling Asia instead of trekking the equally obtuse route from Arts to UCD’s nearest full off-licence (there’s one on Clonskeagh Road). Be warned though – someday, probably while still here, you truly will look back at your time in Belfield with great fondness, and feel a strangely homely affinity with the concrete masses and the nice people who fed you at The Grind every day. Then you’ll get short-changed in the bar, snap out of your mood, and all will be well with the world again.

Another brick in the Chinese firewall

Gav Reilly investigates the state imposition of censorship in China, a country with a powerful desire to control its self-image at the expense of civil liberties

When most people first think of China, the mind’s eye conjures hazy images of an infinitely vast land, with a Great Wall, hearty but replicable cuisine, a mystic tradition of horoscope and prophecy, and a language that means as much to many as Wingdings. In 21st century Earth, though, and with the inevitable trait of globalism encroaching on formerly impregnable fortresses, China currently circles at a moral roundabout, desperate to keep pulling to the right but pondering being dragged leftward.

Most people will quickly identify China as being the world’s Communist behemoth and a country that has a proud and inescapably controversial history. Most would acknowledge that, in line with this, those with the power to do so would aim to curb any significant dissent among its sprawling populace. However, even with this cosmetically reasonable desire, there come occasions where the vehemence of such desire becomes questionable.

China, it seems, has some issues with self-image. This is, after all, a country that refuses, despite the longstanding will of a self-declared autonomous republic’s collective will (namely Taiwan or ‘Chinese Taipei’), to stop claiming its territory as its own; but also a country that, on a whim, can demand and implement some mind-boggling feats of engineering – the Three Gorges hydroelectric dam, which began operation in 2003 and is due for completion in 2009, will cause the state-funded relocation of up to two million people in a purpose-built city. Complaints are rife among the locals (or ex-locals, as the case is now) – a farmer 200 miles away (whose half-acre now lies irreparably flooded), He Kechang (61) has been jailed, seemingly for the innocuous deed of kicking up a fuss.

However, this is the third millennium and newer problems arise. At the turn of the decade Google was an unknown quantity; in 2006 the word has become an everyday verb. Such is the contemporary pace of innovation, and herein lies a significant problem. Enter the Great Firewall of China, a state-instigated online censorship system that does not merely examine and block specific pages, but rather systematically denies even the opportunity to search for pages that the state would rather you didn’t see. When search engine giant Google itself launched in China a few months ago, one of the first searches that the world’s media tried out was Tiananmen Square; the site of the 1989 anti-communist protests. Today, a search on Google.ie returns 3.36m hits. A search on Google.cn (and note that all Google branches work by default from an international database) yields just 52,800 results, mostly relating to Beijing tourism.

Google’s co-founder Larry Page defends this compromise of its mission statement (“to organise the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful”) by arguing, “I think it’s just arrogant of us to walk into a country where we are just beginning operations and tell that country how to run itself.” Common opinion holds, though – and perhaps hopes – that once Google gain a stronger foothold in the territory, it will try and push its power to bend the rules. Searching aside, though, even instant messaging is impeded: a message with the name of ‘Wang Dan’, a famous dissident, will always yield a ‘server timeout’.

And at the time of writing, China was still holding – without charge, and therefore seemingly in contravention of its own laws – a New York Times researcher Zhao Yan, having declared on St Patrick’s Day that his eighteen-month investigation would cease. The reputed reason for Zhao’s internment is that he was allegedly (the NYT have denied Zhao’s involvement) the source of an article proclaiming the resignation of the Chinese head of military a full fortnight before any announcement was made by the State. But why the secrecy about his charge? There are two possibilities. The first is that, according to the State line, Chief Jiang Zemin was not even contemplating resigning but was pressurised into doing so after the NYT piece was run. The source for the article is perhaps someone in a vested interest in Jiang’s departure. Zhao’s arrest, then, may have just been a (seemingly petty) revenge for the scoop – an excellent demonstration of Chinese realpolitik in that Zhao was practicing western journalistic principles while bound by Chinese, where the media is not a spectator but the State’s “throat and tongue”.

Then again, there is always the second possibility. Zhao was known for fighting the cause of smalltime farmers being trampled upon by society. Perhaps, then, Zhao’s ‘journalistic’ arrest was a front – Zhao was about to publically declare hunger strike in defence of none other than 61-year-old He Kechang.

And so the cycle continues. Kechang was arrested for kicking up a fuss. Zhao was arrested – albeit in a more intricated web – for trying to defend him. But one must wonder whether China is intent on merely pulling its weight in defence of its brighter image, or whether the State is being overtly draconian in trying to push everything back into the right turns on the roundabout.

Shame, though, that the citizen’s of China can’t try to see it for themselves: the New York Times just now happens to be another brick in the firewall.

A con job well done

Film review: Inside Man

It should be said pretty quickly off the mark: this is a very slick movie. Framed by smooth credits and a clunking (if not slightly inappropriate) Panjabi PC soundtrack, Spike Lee’s latest offering casts Denzel Washington as Keith Frazier, a deputy detective who happens to be standing in charge when Clive Owen’s band of elite criminals hold up a Manhattan bank, trying to pull off the world’s most perfect bank robbery.

It must be said that this is not you average cop thriller. For one, Washington is cast as a surprisingly affable detective, avoiding the usual pitfall of playing either a good or bad cop. He’s simply a nice guy who loves his girl, and his partner is equally as charming and smiley as he is. Frazier’s methodology of dealing with Owen as the troupe ringleader is also surprisingly amiable, and not without its charms. Owen, meanwhile, is pedantic and calculated to the point of being chilling and plays his part with a degree of phlegmatism that is nonetheless thoroughly intense and convincing.

As with most cop movies, the plot suffers from being just a tad over-scripted but luckily enough restrains itself from descending into a farcical string of plot twists and over-choreographed surprises. It must also be said that the climax is too indistinct and overdrawn to be compelling, but still leaves a satisfaction of a job well done. Inside Man, therefore, is the type of movie that you’ll probably watch every time it’s on Sky Movies – not a masterpiece, but a piece of cinema for which Spike Lee would be justifiably proud.