I’ve been back from Konstanz for two weeks and it hasn’t stopped raining. This hasn’t helped my bout of post-holiday blues, which came on during the train journey home. I thought about how much fun it’d been, which cheered me up, but then I remembered that it was over and that depressed me again.

I tried not to think too much and instead read my book for four hours straight, which made my head ache and my eyes blurry but at least it gave me something to think about other than the fact that I was no longer on holiday and my friends and boyfriend had all left the country that morning.

I had arrived in Konstanz about twenty minutes after everyone else. Adam met me on the platform and we walked out of the station and crossed the road to a café, where everyone else was sitting outside sipping the first beers of the trip. After exchanging details of each other’s journeys and Adam explaining that he’d been ripped off twice in Zurich (couldn’t use his German rail card to pay for the train ticket to Konstanz and they gave him his change in Swiss francs) we made our way over to the apartment on Münsterplatz.

They say you learn a lot about a person when you go on holiday with them. It was on holiday that I learned that Cassie can’t be expected to drink two bottles of wine and then go on a camel ride without being ill, and that she prefers to not have her veganism questioned when at a Chinese restaurant she is trying to explain in English to a seventeen-year-old Chinese Spanish waiter that what she wants, instead of anything on the menu, is a vegetable dish of her own design composed of an amalgamation of all the vegan elements of the items on the specials page.

Things I learned on holiday in Konstanz:

Aneesh has a summer look.

Modelling the winter 07 and summer 08 collections.

and is worried about the notorious German towel thieves (Deutsche Handtuchdiebe).

You can't be too careful.

Jenko is, as we suspected, a perv.

Helen is the boss of Johnny.

Johnny did enjoy watching the Südwest Philharmonik’s last performance of the season out by the lake whilst eating croissants, sipping champagne, and paddling in the water, but he wouldn’t want to do it two days in a row. Things would be different if this was Boys on Tour, which, as Helen and I reminded him, it wasn’t.


Adam is…I don’t want to say “a slob”….Adam is untidy.

We shared a room for a week.

I am tasty. Having barely recovered from the recent foot incident, I was dismayed to find that by the second night word had got round and several vampire insects had visited (and brought straws), leaving me with swollen patches of oversized bites anew.

Nice.

Monday morning saw me banging irritably on the door of the chemist, swallowing half a packet of antihistamines and sellotaping the rest to the window as a warning to the mosquity bastards.


Stew feels alive on a bike.

Like every other holidaymaker in Konstanz, we had the idea to hire bikes. However, it soon transpired that only Adam, Stew, and I had been on a bike in the last ten years and no-one else wanted to go.

As this was a holiday, and not the Tour de France, I was looking forward to a bit of a tootle round the lake, perhaps wearing a floaty cotton frock and perching side saddle on a bike with a basket, stopping every now and then to sit on a bench and gaze elegantly out over the tranquil waters, remarking to Adam that this is quite the pleasant town, what?

We needed a route. We were in tourist info, looking at maps. Or, more accurately, Adam and Stew were looking at maps -I was sitting on a chair fanning myself with a leaflet about ferry companies and looking at a tank of tropical fish.

“Where shall we go then?” I eventually asked.

“We thought we’d go to this island,” said Adam, pointing at the map. “It’s got a castle.”

Oh good. Another castle.

“How far is it?”

“Not far.” Over the years I have learned that Adam’s idea of not far differs greatly from mine by several orders of magnitude.

“How far?”

“15 k.”

“There and back? I can’t ride 30 kilometres in a day! It’s 30 degrees outside. And it’ll be further than you think. Are you sure we can get to it?” I said, peering over at the map.

“Of course!” cried Stew. “It’s not that far, we can easily do it in a day if we set off soon and go at a fair pace.”

This is the trouble with boys. They want to “do” things. They had hardly been out of the water since we’d arrived. I’d dangled my feet in over the side of a pedalo and was more than content, as was Helen, who had briefly considered going in but decided against it as she’d just put sun cream on.

They're a bit short, Stew.

In the end, caving to weighty peer pressure, I did dip myself in for a few minutes so that in years to come I can say that the majority of me has been in the Bodensee.

However, I soon regretted the decision as I began to foresee a problem with getting back into the pedalo. I won’t go into detail besides saying that it was a rather undignified moment involving Adam hauling me up me under the arms and Jenko steadying the boat from the other side. I seemed to have taken on the grace and dimensions of a very pregnant elephant and have since tried to erase the incident from memory.

A pedalo not unlike the one the I struggled to reoccupy.

I’d thus had quite enough of “doing” and was planning on spending the rest of the day lying in the shade wearing a big hat, drinking warm beer, and trying to not get sweat on my book. I certainly didn’t want to do anything at a “fair pace”.

In the end a compromise was agreed; Stew departed for the island and Adam and I set off along the lake. We didn’t tootle but neither was it a time trial. Bench rests were less frequent than I would have liked and I spent most of the afternoon trying to make out Adam as a distant blot on the horizon but it was very pleasant and energizing, if a little hot in the midday sun.

We retuned to the apartment at lunchtime to find Jenko asleep in the lounge and Aneesh watching CNN. Apparently Stew had been back earlier. He’d followed the route to the island but come to a point where he could either go across the Swiss border or go on the motorway so he’d turned around. He’d now gone to buy a hat.

One evening we came across a wine and food festival and spent the rest of the night being jolly in the German way, which involves sitting on long wooden benches in a tent, swigging beer from large, heavy-bottomed glasses, and wondering exactly how many sausages is an indecent number to consume in one go.

Lovely German dead thing on a spit.

On the way back we saw this Leeds sign in a shop window, which we were all very excited about and was very fitting as we all met at Leeds University six years ago.

In a result that is quite the reverse of what I'd have predicted at the outset, I would love to go on holiday with everyone again (even Jenko) and I am in no way glad to be back.

Luckily the next trip is never very far off, which is possibly the reason I have managed to save not a euro in the entire two years of earning a living.