At Kröpcke

Is Kröpcke masculine, feminine or neuter? Either way, it’s basically Hannover’s main square. I’m sitting outside an Italian coffee house called Giovanni L. at Kröpcke on a Sunday lunchtime. Several female Hannoverians (please say that word slowly several times!) solemnly recommended this place to me: “Honestly, you’ve got to go there!”

The waitress brings me a tiramisu cream cake that is simply enormous. In size, rather than flavour.

In one direction you can see the railway station, and in the other the opera house and Peek & Cloppenburg. At first glance, there’s no sign of Ernst August here. Oh yes, there is: the equestrian statue by the station...

The square is only moderately busy today, nowhere near as packed as central Vienna. On Sundays, bitter trench warfare breaks out there between hordes of Italian tourists and barbaric Japanese people (please say that slowly too – barbaric Japanese people!), all over the best photo of Vienna – or something like that.

I’m the only person here with a camera. Yet the city isn’t nearly as ugly as I’d originally feared.

Carousel and street music

Opposite me is a carousel with the following educational mission: teach children from an early age that life goes round in circles. And everything costs money, even if it achieves absolutely nothing and you end up exactly where you started. All accompanied by songs from the “New German Wave”, which by now should really be called the “Ancient German Wave”. So three-year-olds ride the carousel “completely detached from the Earth”. “Da, da, da, you don’t love me, I don’t love you...” Trio!

But as if the music weren’t bad enough for a lovely Sunday, there are also a few buskers next to it playing the “greatest” hits of the last millennium: “Oh, when the saints go marchin’ in”... “Marina, Marina, Marina...”

I wonder whether giving them ten euros would persuade them to stop the racket at last. But it would probably have the opposite effect.

“Fred from Jupiter, Fred from Jupiter...” The women here wear strange shoes, some of them at least. The other day, I saw a woman of about 40 on the underground who was dressed relatively normally: blue blouse, blue skirt, black tights, completely unremarkable really. But she was wearing black slippers with a large white skull stuck to them.

Rain woman and rain man

Instead of saying “that’s absolutely brilliant”, people here say “that’s awesome”. At last the buskers have cleared off. It’s the first day in two weeks without rain. The Polish waitress at my hotel, whose name is Anja, was wittering on about “Siebenschläfertag” (Germany’s St Swithin’s Day) and “seven weeks of rain”... Anyway, they’re bound to break every rainfall record here this year. Let everyone back home roast in 40-degree heat. I don’t care!

And near Kröpcke they’ve put up a rain woman and a rain man.

What? Suddenly there are hordes of scouts marching around here in full uniform with 20 kilos of kit! It’s all far too well-behaved for me, so I’m heading on to the world’s largest Schützenfest...