bitte - please
bitte - please, you're welcome, could you hand me that map?, yo-move it!, whatevery you need it to mean at the time
today we played tourist. we took the U-bahn to the potsdamer platz, walked through the holocaust memorial to the brandenburg gate, around the pariser platz, and back past the reichstag. honestly, i expect to take this same route about 8 times during our stay with all of our guests, so i wasn't paying too much attention to the sites. in fact we walked right past goethe's grave and i didn't even notice.
what i did notice was the word "bitte." it's everywhere. it's all they say! how does anyone accomplish anything when all they say is "bitte"? so i started saying it too. using just the few words we remember when faced with a situation in which actual german must be used (danke, eine tasse kaffe, wo is WC?), and the word bitte, we have managed to get groceries, order food, and talk a german speaking greek bartender into putting the colts/steelers game on the big screen!
okay, hyperbole should be one of my words of the day, given that i am prone to it, but i am actually pretty proud of us for getting by with as little german as we know. after dipping our toes in the cultural shoppingscape that is IKEA, we are feeling empowered. we'll see what happens tomorrow when dan goes to work, where everyone speaks english, and i am left to my own devices.
today we played tourist. we took the U-bahn to the potsdamer platz, walked through the holocaust memorial to the brandenburg gate, around the pariser platz, and back past the reichstag. honestly, i expect to take this same route about 8 times during our stay with all of our guests, so i wasn't paying too much attention to the sites. in fact we walked right past goethe's grave and i didn't even notice.
what i did notice was the word "bitte." it's everywhere. it's all they say! how does anyone accomplish anything when all they say is "bitte"? so i started saying it too. using just the few words we remember when faced with a situation in which actual german must be used (danke, eine tasse kaffe, wo is WC?), and the word bitte, we have managed to get groceries, order food, and talk a german speaking greek bartender into putting the colts/steelers game on the big screen!
okay, hyperbole should be one of my words of the day, given that i am prone to it, but i am actually pretty proud of us for getting by with as little german as we know. after dipping our toes in the cultural shoppingscape that is IKEA, we are feeling empowered. we'll see what happens tomorrow when dan goes to work, where everyone speaks english, and i am left to my own devices.
posted by jordan at
4:44 PM
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