Die dritte Mal

Round three!

Yesterday was my third round of German meetup-ing and it probably wasn’t as crazy a learning experience as the second one but it was still pretty good.

The group was much smaller and with significantly less fluent speakers - there were 6 of us for most of the night: 2 native speakers, 2 kind-of speakers (myself and man-with-the-long-distance-relationship), and 2 entirely non-speakers. I was on the end of the table with long-distance man and one of the native speakers, so after a bit of an english-based start, we got talking in pretty broken german with the assistance of one of the native speakers.

Highlights:

• Long-distance man is, as I write, on his way to visit his girlfriend in Germany (he’s transferring - umsteige - in Abu Dhabi). His dad is also in Germany at the moment so they’ll be facilitating the inaugural parent-meeting between the two families! Then they’ll spend 12 days in Jordan, and one of those days is her birthday. With him he’s brought a birthday card and some face masks (gesichtemasken), but he’s also sent a surprise (uberraschen) birthday package to her home that should arrive after he’s gone home.

• Black forest cake (Schwarzwaldekirchtorten) is a “torte”, while things like apple cake (apfelkuchen) is a “kuchen” - kuchen are typically single-layer, dusted icing sugar affairs that are simple to make, whereas “torte” implies a fancier dessert with layers.

• Different ways of being braindead:

• “KO” (keh-oh), as in knocked out, used literally as the opposite of being OK!

• zerditscht - an adjective describing a fruit that’s been bruised by falling on the ground (this is my new favourite way of being braindead.)

• A southern German Easter tradition: “Ostereierditschen” (note the use of “ditsch” again!). Something like christmas crackers: people partner off and crack their painted boiled eggs against each other and the one that is least cracked wins! Typically eaten with bread and ham.