Doch

My German goal: figure out what "doch" means. The Germans throw it around in all sorts of different situations, so I can't get a handle on it. I have to tell you, it's frustrating that these little kids speak much better German than I do.

My other German goal: stop mental block with "will". In German, when you say "Ich will" it means "I want (to)". And in English it means--well, I think we all know. But anyway, also in German you would say "Ich mache" to mean both "I am doing" and "I will (in the very near future) do", so I always want to say "Ich will machen" to mean "I will do", although that obviously isn't right. I have known this verb since probably 9th grade, and I still can't get past this somehow.

Another thing. In certain sentance structures, the verb goes at the end of the sentance, for example: "Ich habe nicht aufgewacht, weil ich so müde war," which means "I didn't wake up because I was so tired." The verb "war" means "was" (and "ich" means "I"), but since it comes after "weil", "war" goes at the end of the sentence. It's not so bad there, but when you have a really long sentence, 1) How can you remember if you put a verb in or not?, and 2) When listening to someone talk, how can you remember everything they said and realize that they didn't put a verb at the end? If no one here put verbs at the end of their sentences, I wouldn't notice. I guess my mind just functions differently than if I had grown up speaking German.

OK, enough with the language lesson. So, twice for dinner Stefan has made a salad, which consists of lettuce, tomatoes, and some kind of dressing that I have never had. Both times the dressing was this weird sweet/sour thing that I didn't really like (I am such an American). Anyway, today Stefan asked me what he could do to the salad so that I would like it, and I said, don't put that dressing on. Well, apparently they were two different dressings--although to my credit (as you're thinking I have a horribly unsophisticated palate) they both had the same base, but two different versions of the same thing. Stefan told me to taste each of them, saying one was sweet/sour and one was more sweet to see if there was one I liked better. He got some of the stuff on the spoon and then stuck the whole thing in my mouth--and then I burst out coughing, my eyes were watering, and my throat was burning. I downed nearly a whole glass of water while Stefan was trying to pretend he wasn't laughing and Stephanie was yelling at him for giving me so much at once. I learned my lesson after that though, and I only took a little bit of the next one. (By the way, they still tasted exactly the same.) (By the way again, my throat still hurts.)

I think they're both convinced I am a super picky eater. I'm not though; I mean, I don't like cheese and sausage, but other than that I like a lot of stuff. And the food here is really different, so I don't think they can hold it against me that I think all of it is so weird. Plus, I really don't mind eating bread with meat on it every night for dinner. And hey, the carrots and sugar thing was good, and so is most of the meat and all of the bread.

Oh, and let me just say, I love the anhänger for the bike. It's not even that I'm too lazy to walk the 5 minutes to kindergarten to pick up Johanna; I just love riding the bike with the anhänger on it. I feel like such a mom, standing there waiting for Johanna with my bike and the anhänger on the back, and Dominik there with me riding his little bike. I'll have to take a picture of it to show how cute it is.