So I thought living abroad for a year might change me a bit, I didn't anticipate it would change my face. On Friday night we were in a club/bar place in town and the German kids on the dancefloor went a little bit crazy to some skate/punk type tune. I've seen some pretty extreme dancing in my time (the Fugazi gig at Brixton academy springs to mind) but there was enourmous pleasure being taken in aggressively shoving each other about that I've never seen before, especially following on from a sequence of silly songs including Madonna and Michael Jackson. Anyway, one guy came flying backwards across the room and hit me between the eyes with the back of his head. I realised pretty early my nose was broken, and the x-rays confirmed it in the hospital later. So I had to get up early Saturday to go back to the ENT clinic (or HNO as it is here). German healthcare is almost efficient, but not quite, e.g. they asked me to cycle to the other building, pick up the x-rays myself and then bring them back to the ENT doc. They sat me in the scariest room I have ever been in in my life, surrounded by 2000 medieval looking nose torture tools and several tanks of gas. I felt quite uneasy. But the doc didn't do much, he just said, yes, your nose is broken. They have to re-set it under general anaesthetic. It's a five minute procedure, but they like to keep you in for 24 hours. This doesn't fit very well with my plan to fly to Edinburgh for a wedding on Wednesday. So, I go back to the clinic this afternoon, hopefully to arrange to have it done very early Tuesday morning, and then get let out late Tuesday night. There's a chance of three days of bleeding apparently, let's hope that doesn't happen...

On Saturday, Alex, Fiona and I went shopping in Karlsruhe. Retail therapy, though not so easy when I still haven't been paid. I bought a fleece pullover on my visa card anyway. Fiona and Alex really got into it, though the scary thing was, though they bought all their new clothes in different stores, when they tried them on at home they co-ordinated perfectly. In fact, they looked like they were modelling this season's collection from one shop. I took a picture of them that I'll put up when I get the opportunity. Karlsruhe's nicht so schlecht for buying clothes, better than it is for clubs anyway.

On Sunday Alex set off for Berlin frühmorgens, and Fiona and I went to the Schloss. It's all a museum inside, and it was really very impressive. For €3 you get to see an enourmous amount of statues stolen from Strasbourg cathedral while the Germans owned it, and a load of other altarpieces and icons taken out of German churches (presumably because they were too valuable, but maybe to protect them during the war?) dating from 1200-1500. They've arranged them really well in the museum to look impressive.

Also in the Schloss is some furniture from when it was the seat of the Duke (that's the best translation of Großherzog I can come up with). Pretty amazing stuff, also going round it with Fiona is quite comical as she keeps saying things like, "ooh, my Grandma's sofa is just like that", when you're looking at an early 1800s chaise longue covered in gold leaf, or, "that reminds me, I must get the scratch on my writing desk fixed", when you look at Großherzog Karl Freidrich's Schreibtisch. It's funny because her grandmother's sofa probably really does look like that, and her writing desk probably doesn't look that different from Karl's.

There was also a collection of the Großherzog's hunting equipment, including what must have been duelling pistols:

"Would you like swords, pistols or daggers?"
"I choose daggers!"
"In zat case I will take ze pistols.."