Wie spat ist es?

Germany in mid to late 1980's was a fascinating place. The wall in Berlin had not yet come down. Change was in the air but no one really knew what that meant yet. Gorbachev was in power, Reagan was on the way out with and Bush Sr. in the wings as understudy.

The American Army along with the Bundeswehr were planning and preparing for a sudden invasion by the forces of the Warsaw Pact. As far as we knew the Soviet combat soldier was eight-feet tall, impervious to pain, and hungry to chew the tender meat from out delicate American bones.

A part of preparing the American soldier for combat with these behemoths was a week of instruction in the basics of the German language. There was no escaping this course. You had to attend, and attend you did.

The class I attended was taught by a small but lovely young lady with long reddish-brown hair. She was a good teacher who didn't brook nonsense and was fully capable of handling the wise-guys and lover boys that come with any group of young men.

We learned to count, einz, zwei, drei,  and so forth. The definitives were covered, Die, Der, and Das. It was interesting to learn that there was no system to assign one either of the others to a non-gender specific word.

Most everyone struggled at one level or another but for some reason I did not. German for one reason or another clicked easily in my head.

On the last day of class we walked to downtown Kitzengen as both a final test and as a social opportunity. Our assignment was to ask the local folks some basic questions  such as what time is it and where is the bakery, in German and to get the answers in German.

Once we had all done that, we would meet at a local restaurant where we would speak German to each other, order our food in German, and conduct the financial transactions in German using the German money.

As expected, the plan was good, but the actual execution did not go as expected.

I asked the first person I saw, "Wo ist die Backerie?", only to be told in accented English, "across the street young man." Sure enough, the bakery was across the street. I marked it as a win because she had understood the question.

I walked a couple of blocks to an intersection and approached an older gentleman, "Entschuldigen sie bitte, wie spat ist es?"

He looked at me with a smile, then laughed heartily and pointed to the large clock tower directly above his head. As he walked away he continued to laugh.

I do believe that both of those folks had seen this before and were having some fun at my expense.

Der salat und Schnitzel war gut, das Bier ist frisch, und das ist alles.