Number or Nummer

I'm slowly but surely loosing my ability to spell in English, in fact I just had to stop myself from spelling "English" with and -sch at the end like in German. It's not just my spelling that's going to crap, I now speaking what would best be defined as Denglisch, at mixture of Deutsch and Englisch.
Here are some of my normal mistakes:

• Yes, bitte
• Pass me the Messer (knife)
  
• I still haven't melded an (anmelden=register)
  
• When are we going to make the test? (in German you machst eine Prüfung--literally make a test)

It makes for some funny looks from the Germans and laughter from the English speakers.
Speaking of funny looks, yesterday, Craig and I went to Kaufland to get groceries (I almost called it Lebensmittel). One thing I should mention about German grocery stores is that there are no sackers for your groceries, in fact there are no sacks. In fairness they have them, but you have to pay 19 Eurocents for them, which I find ridiculous, but then again I'm a bit of a miser. But I digress, anyways, we bought a shit ton of groceries, and the bus doesnt run to Mühlbachäcker (our dorm) on Saturday so we would have had to schlepp all of these bags about ~2 km back home. We decided to use the cart (for which we had to pay a 1€ deposit) to get the groceries home. I have never been stared at so much in my life! You would have thought we were carrying a dead body in the cart, the way people stared at us. One guy looked at us and then faced away but kept his eyes on us as he walked past...it was hilarious. We did look a little crazy because the sidewalk slopes and Craig had to push the cart at a 45 degree angle to keep it from going into the road.

In other news, my Sprachkurs is over. On the balance I liked it, I didn't learn a whole lot, but I got to practice speaking, met lots of cool people, and got help with the verdammt deutsche Bureaucracy. I do wish that they had helped us register for classes, but that turned out to be easier that I expected. The online course catalog is shit, and by the time we were enrolled in the Uni the registration period was over, so we had to email professors and ask to be in their class. Turns out you can just show up for a class and ask to register there, apparently it's quite common. One thing that Sara, our Tutorin who has the most amazing voice ever, said was "it is your right to study". She said it in German of course, but it was very reminiscent of the French student riots. I just thought it was cool.

Oh and just a quick aside, I (rather we, there were 20 of us) went to Stuttgart for a day. The weather was shit, and the Italians ended up leaving a person behind, but it was fun. The first thing we see when we get out of the train station is--Hold on, I need to set this up right before I tell you. Ok in the movie Eurotrip, there is a running joke that nothing sexual shocks Europeans because "they have orange juice commercials with lesbians and dildos." So armed with this stereotype I can tell you the story. We get out of the underground train station and the first thing we see of Stuttgart is a giant poster with a bottle of hunts ketchup and a naked woman behind it. You can actually see nipple. Needless to say, I bought the poster. 7€ well spent.

Read more >> Options >>