Casting chaos on Roman remains

early adventures - Southern France, 2003

Reaching class level 7, we had to choose between French and Latin classes. The choice was to learn a language of living people or a language of tombstone engravings, so all my classmates picked French. Which was enough motivation for me to pick Latin. I was not interested in France (or any other country) at the time, Germany seemed big enough for a lifetime of explorations. When switching school later for senior classes I had a second chance to learn French, and a second time I refused. I might be one of very few people getting my degree in Southwestern Germany, successfully avoiding any French. And spontaneously moving to France 10 years later, desperately buried in verb conjugation tables and audio exercises promising: Français facile.

Choosing Latin meant joining the parallel class for this course - a class of mainly boys who seemed quite bori... hey are you playing Magic the Gathering over there!? Cool xD I will bring my cards!

Coming back to my own class after the Latin lessons felt more and more strange. There was more an ambience of ambition, much less laughter and they seemed not to understand why I could spend a whole lesson laughing tears after reading from the maths course book:

Eine dicke 10 cm lange Katze wird bei einer Stunde Brenndauer um 2 cm kürzer.

I started to long for the lunch breaks and Latin classes where I could play and fool around with the boys. Much to our excitement, there was a class trip announced to us:

Lateinerfahrt. The most legendary class trip of my life.

Let's see... Pencil case and drawing paper. My favourite Magic card decks (blue and white, with small flying creatures). Discman and a stock of batteries. Teenage love story book. Jep... I'm ready to face that bus drive and everything that may arrive on the way!

It was a long drive to southern France where some remains of roman culture were supposed to wait for German adolescents entering in puberty with nothing else on their minds than a burning interest for ruins and museums. I forced one of my two in-ears to every person having the questionable fate to sit next to me, to not deny them the enjoyment of my favourite music (mostly CDs showing an alien in glowing colours with a headphone). Of course the split headphone resulted in both of us staying with merely a vague idea of the song over the noise of the engine and classmates, which probably was big luck, conserving some valuable friendships for a little longer.

We exchanged some books we had brought with us (mostly fantasy. Big hype for James Clemens at the time, Dragonlance and Harry Potter), and randomly I took a pen and a lined paper and decided to start writing a story. It was about a girl longing to have a cat and entering a fantasy world through a big dark labyrinth, where she got involved with a quest given by the scary cat goddess Moona, and found her crush running away after a wild half-cat girl named Saya.

I passed the first chapter to one of my friends in the bus and he read it and stated he liked it, so I continued with the writing. It became a long story, written in tiny, almost unreadable pencil writing on hundreds of pages that felt like a wild trip through random dream scenes. I did one big attempt in digitalizing / rewriting it some years later in many hours of work at my first computer, but I managed to loose the file and never tried again.

It was less than one week we spent in southern France, but we wished it would last forever. The teachers pushed us through museums, ruins and carefully conserved mosaics where we got long guided visits and explanations which we did not at all the attention to follow. I remember the feeling of minute by minute passing with hurting legs of standing for too long, the fight for the few places to sit - and passing the time with more interesting conversations with classmates, preferably mourning, making fun about the teachers and having quote battles of our funniest books.

The Mediterranean sea in southern France is clear like the Caribbean. The sunlight paints glowing patterns of ripples onto the sand floor under the waves. The beach seams to reach several hundred kilometers all from Nice to Barcelona (still need to verify this). And the waves wash up a neverending stock of colourful, twisted sea shells all over the shore. The water in summer is warm and carries you easily when you lie on the surface, gently pushed by the waves. The only problem with such an obvious paradise is, of course, humans occupying the beach in summer all from Nice to Barcelona like sardines in a tin.

We went to the beach for just one afternoon. I remember sunburn, skin and hair sticking with the drying sea salt and sand in every fold of the bod... bags.

My turn? Okay, drawing a card... ah, nice. Playing an island. Casting... no. Casting nothing. Spirit comes to visit you I think...

Uahahah are you sure you want to attack me?

Hmh. Yes. Say hi!

Then take that. HI! Grill party! The pleasure of playing red!

Oh, you want to destroy my creature? I don't think so... countered. The pleasure of playing blue.

Ah verdammt.

So, three points of damage to your life points. And your dragon goes back to your hand.

Magic the Gathering is tension and frustration. It means spending days on the strategy of your deck and celebrating the day it actually works as planned (after countless games of throwing cards onto the battle field randomly because drawing the wrong cards at the wrong time). Enjoying to have beautiful images in your hands. Breaking the ice with random people you never met before. Turning friends into enemies by blocking their favourite plans and insulting their favourite cards. It's an endless field for discussion about the rocket science of a 300+ page rule system which teenagers learn but even grownups never completely understand. It's loosing (and occasionally winning) against people who have newer cards and spent more money on their decks than you. It's big, big fun ^^

If we just had more time for ourselves... I just want to sit here with the guys and play Magic and Truth or Dare. But it seemed that the idea of adolescents having fun was not cultural enough for any concept of a class trip...

What a nice time it was back then, when things happened so naturally and easily! When a life of fun, freedom and adventures seemed to be waiting for me, if I just could break free of these boring school lessons and grow up quickly so I would finally be able to take my own decisions...!

That was before I got my acne, and before life got this bitter taste of rivalry, rejection, mistrust and fear. Growing up sucked. Life would never be the same again.