The Horrible Covid Injection and the nice German Doctor

 Lo and behold I had my 4th injection last week and I am on blood thinners with a bandage around my leg. I had the jab on Tuesday and felt a bit tired on Wednesday. The pain in my leg was there on Thursday after all the fatigue and blurriness had subsided. Obviously, this was some form of muscle cramp as I explained to my wife who works in Drug Safety the following day when the pain had breached a threshold where I would have to tell her.

The pain and swelling in my leg grew and shrank. Sometimes it was hotter and more swollen and sometimes it subsided to a level where I could hobble but at a reasonable pace and not completely inelegantly. 

On Friday the local hospital outpatient thought it was muscular and told me to keep an eye on it and that it was too early for it to be related to the vaccine. 

During this period I had been working but had not been able to walk much as I waited for the pain to die down as I was due to travel to Munich (about 6 hours) to work in the office. On Monday I hobbled to the local GP who compared the two legs with a measuring tape (the Germans like that kind of thing) and declared that I had a thrombosis of the leg and organised a prescription and a blood test.

There are no lessons to be learned but I was pretty healthy before the jab and now I'm not. No Good Deed Goes Unpunished and I am reminded by my wife of how fatal blood clots can be. 

Next week I'll have a check-up and go to Munich as I expect I will be a bit better by then. In the meantime, I am handing over a project to a colleague and I've come up with an art idea that I may be able to do with someone who works locally.

Guglhupf Geschwader at the Cinema in Munich

 I saw my first film at the cinema in Germany yesterday, This is the latest in a series of crime films set in rural Bavaria. These are based on books by a lady called Rita Falk. Both the films and the books deserve to be better known but I would expect that an English or American version would lose some of the humour.

There is a main character the cop who is Bavarian Bruce Willis and his friend Rudi, they comprise 'the Dream Team'. The other family members, colleagues and friends are always involved in the case or cases as there was a serial murderer in an earlier film. Despite the deaths this is a funny film that celebrates rural Bavaria and its manners and customs.

I saw it at the Sendlinger Tor Cinema which is a great venue and the actors and the writer were there to promote it. There is no way I would have been able to enjoy them talking about working on the film (30 days a year and they produced one during the pandemic) and encouraging people to support local bookshops and not Amazon.

This aspect of Germany is such a revelation. Their vibrant film industry and their humour. Guglhupf Geschwader is doing twice the box office of 'Bullet Train' and I am not surprised. There is no hullabaloo about the promotion of this film, no men dressed in skirts to create attention just hard working actors and writers who enjoy what they are doing.

Unexpected Things in the German Language 'KopfKino' and 'Mimik'

 I moved to Germany last year with no job lined up as my wife had an opportunity over there. To get a job and to function well you need to speak and understand German. I continue to learn and I am surprised and fascinated with the culture and activities that Germany has to offer.

One myth is that all the German words are long and there is a shorter English equivalent. In my new job I train people in English who may have English as their 2nd or 3rd language. It's a balance between making the course boring by using too simplistic phrasing or being entertaining and having references they don't understand without explanation. I try and avoid anything that sounds too 'new age' even if I think that the concept works. Often I use the term visualisation to encourage people to share information in pictures or graphs or to rehearse mentally a situation they are going to be involved in. It turns out the Germans have a word kopfkino (head cinema) that does all the work for me and more and is more elegant. Another word I have discovered is Mimik which is German for facial expressions.

Getting past the surface and stereotypes of culture opens up a different game to explore and try out new things. Mark Twain may have complained about the German language but I put that in Mark Twain's nature to tweak the tail of his host country.