Holiday Romance
By Mikki.Goffin The very phrase ‘holiday romance’ conjures up images of sun-drenched beaches, moonlit skinny-dips, flirtatious glances exchanged from the pool-side bar and tears at the airport. One usually imagines a sultry sunset backdrop in Cyprus, Barbados, Paris or Rome.
 Even if there is no ‘romance’ to be had, summer holidays should surely, at the very least, involve plenty of cocktails and tanned lithe bodies.
Before too long you expect to be communicating with forthright foreigners in the universal mother tongue of French kissing.
But at the tender age of sixteen, my summers destination summer was Dusseldorf, Germany, and although it was bound to make a change from my dreary English schoolgirl existence, an exotic, erotic experience seemed unlikely. That is, assuming the pictures in my German textbook were anything to go by. I was only studying GCSE German because I preferred it slightly to French and Latin, and true to my side of the contract in the school’s exchange programme, I had to spend two weeks there.
I stayed with a kindly but competitively eccentric couple called Gunter and Anke Meyer and their deeply troubled teenage daughter, Eva, who back-combed her hair and wore unflattering square-rimmed glasses and oversized army fatigues. In addition she had a penchant for bad music and solitude and didn’t speak a word of English.
Her parents warmed to me immediately, simply because I was neither underweight nor vegetarian, both of which they seemed to perceive as intolerable afflictions.
Gunter was a wildly demonstrative, expansive man with no discernible chin and his wife, five-foot-nothing of undiluted maternal overkill, was overwhelmingly loud in every way.
Dusseldorf has a reputation as being "Die langste Theke der Welt" (the world’s longest bar), but I was too young to legally drink. According to the guide book it has a “wealth of historical and cultural delights”, which I was too young to fully admire or appreciate.
But one evening I did make it to a rather lively social establishment, breaking the law with a steady succession of strong bottled beers. Within half an hour Eva was drunk and a random stranger we met was becoming rather over-familiar.
Certain personal facts were soon established. His name was Ferdinand. He was nearly two feet taller than me and ten years older. He had a nervous tic and a lazy eye and he smelled of garlic.
 Upon reaching Kirsten’s level of inebriation, none of this mattered however.
As everyone knows, being intoxicated renders you free from the constraints of socially acceptable behaviour. And there is something about being in a foreign country that somehow makes this skewed sense of freedom and abandon even more pronounced.
So by ten to midnight, all three of us were feeding each other schnitzels underneath a secluded footbridge and communicating with some considerable enthusiasm in the universal mother tongue.
Not a Holiday Romance, but then again, not really a holiday. A European educational experience. Enlightening. That’s what it was. And that’s what education is supposed to be about – not just “learning stuff” – being enlightened.
A few days later, I returned to England ten pounds heavier and at least three impolite German phrases wiser, finally realising why the majority of my German lessons had focused on ordering food and drink, describing different kinds of meat and asking the way to the nearest train station.
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