Having lived in Berlin for almost 3 years now, I often forget what life was like back in the UK. The simple day to day things that are just a touch different over here, like the ability to buy cured meat within 5 minutes of walk of wherever you are or, somewhat more importantly, the fact that people treat each other like human beings. As in, people will generally try to help you rather than thinking 'who the fuck is this freak talking to me in public'.
Yesterday though, I was reminded of something a little darker, something I've not experienced in around 3 years. On the way to Alexa, I was stood, patiently waiting for the U2 to make its way south, when a large group of dickwads got on the train, not unheard of event here, there are plenty of idiots around and they do like to gather together to be idiotic. Although this time I noticed things were a little different when two of said nob-rashes tried to squeeze into the same seat, generally pushing/knocking over the irate passengers who were previously sat peacefully. Some people got up and moved to another part of the train and the two morons, now sat in vacated seats, decided to start talking LOUDLY in english to whoever had been unwise enough to stay, mostly hassling a poor girl with leery comments. At this point, a few more of the gobshites joined in, generally hassling all the girls there and being rather annoying. Now, this is fairly normal behaviour, if it's 2am in a club. At 7pm on a busy train, not so much.
During all this the train hadn't moved, it seems that a couple of them were/had been fighting on the platform and the police had turned up, this led to lots of 'just fucking leaving it man' and 'it's not worth it' shite with friends holding back their moronic mates from going to, presumably, fight with the police. Eventually the police asked them all to get off the train, which they surprisingly just did, and we went on our way. Hopefully the group are now locked up in some dank police basement until their flight home.
It was all a little shocking, I had simply forgotten that people acted in such a way, I've become so used to German dipshits and morons, who are, frankly, a better class of idiot. For example, on the walk home from the train station, I passed a group of German fuckwits walking down the street, not that different looking from the train group, being loud and drunk, but not hassling anyone, not getting in anybodies way, just being a bit 'normal loud' drunk. Then, in the spatkauf next to my building, there was a gang of about 15 or 20 mentally challenged youths, drinking cheap beer, being loud, but still leaving enough of the pavement for people to walk past and, amazingly, not shouting at or hassling anybody that walked by.
It's not that people don't act like dickheads here, it just that it happens so infrequently. The last time I witnessed anything remotely the same was around a year and a half ago, when some steroid moron with a small penis and a bulldog started shouting at a woman because she wouldn't let his dog hump hers or some such nonsense.
There are many things here in Germany that can be irritating (like the fact most things are stuck in 1980), but the things that they do better here more than make up for it.
PS. See if you can guess which country the train morons were from. I'll give you a clue, the first letter starts with a U and the last with a K!
