If you’ve read my first post, you know that I began life in Munich without a phone (having given mine back to my former employer). Now, I have one, since coordinating activities in this city would take about 10 times as long without one. It’s that one Blackberry that the dinosaurs invented, and my “plan” gives me 100 minutes of talking per month, 100 texts per month, and 200 mb of data per month. YouTube’s gonna need a few extra servers to handle all of the requests I’ll be throwing its way.
Category: Expat Life
Post #6: Getting Yelled at by an Old German Man: A How-To
If you want an old German man to get upset and yell at you, two things need to be true. 1) You need to know very little German and 2) something about German society needs to confuse you. Once you have those things, that stern reprimand you always wanted is just a metro ticket machine away.
Overgeneralizations aside, this is the story of what happened to me, yesterday.
It’s 5pm and I’m leaving class. In an hour and twenty minutes, I’ll be meeting Roxana at the train station so that we can take the metro to the Isar River and drink beer and eat pretzels (you know, as we Germans are wont to do).
Right next to the school I attend is an automated kiosk that sells metro tickets. I’m after the kind that lets you ride the metro an unlimited number of times around most of Munich for one week.
I tap a few on-screen icons in a way which I think roughly translates to “I would like one week-long pass to ride the metro around Munich, please” in automated machinese. However, what I really couldn’t stop saying was “I would like a week-long pass to travel to other cities in Germany by the train, please.” My school doesn’t offer a class in this language, so I’m stumped.
I decide to call Roxana to see if she’s purchased something similar in the past. She hasn’t but she wants to help, anyway. So, I start reading screens and narrating my progress to her.
Roxana: You want a pass that lets you travel among 2 or 3 rings inside Munich.
Ryan: When I tap “season pass–weekly,” it wants me to input a destination, like a city or something.
Roxana: Well, that’s-
Now, behind me, I hear some loud German words in a male voice. Distracted by them, I turn to investigate. A grumpy man-face greets me, and I can tell the words are directed at (or are at least about) me. I’m a little confused, but I assume he’s trying to give me instructions. Something like “press that button, dummy.” But he’s not. I apologetically ask “Englisch?” and he responds with “Get off the phone if you’re going to use the machine! I need to use it!”
It’s clear he doesn’t perceive the relationship between my phone call and the adventure I’m on with the machine. I shrug at him and start to say “I am on the phone asking for-” and he says “Go!”
Now, my temper is a little short, but I’m in a country that’s not my own. So, I hit “cancel,” step back, usher him forward, tell him “Go,” and walk away.
So, that’s it. Just a story about an angry guy for your entertainment. I’m trying to learn something from the experience, but I’m not sure I can avoid the same event in the future. If I need to accomplish something, and I don’t know how to do it, yet, then I think I have to hope that whomever is nearby will teach me how to do it. Or someone will have to yell at me and I’ll have to learn some kind of guilt trip technique.
The universe heard my wish later, though, when I met Roxana and we both tried to figure out how to use the machine in the train station. We spent about two seconds in confusion when the guy next to us offered to help. Now, I know how to use that machine. So it ended well. Viele dank, train station guy!
Post #4 – An Obligatory Post about Food (Or, My Blog is Finally a Blog)
Every blog has a million of these, so now mine has one. Let’s do this thing.
Munich is a mulitcultural city with tons of food options yatta yatta blah blah GERMAN FOOD.
Just look at those things.
Roxana and I made it our goal to eat something super German this weekend, and we think we did it. Closest to you in the photo is what Roxana ordered, and my meal is obviously across the table. Both are different cuts of pork, prepared exactly the same way: with a sauce made from dark beer. The yellow mounds on each plate are mostly potatoes, but they taste like they use a lot of other ingredients, as well. The rich vocabulary I’m using to describe these dishes is probably telling you exactly how much we knew about them before we ordered.
Ryan: These have pork in them.
Roxana: Yeah, and they come with potato-somethings. See? Kartoffel.
Ryan: Yeah, and mit dunklebiersauce? That sounds awesome.
Roxana: I say we don’t think much about this and just order something that sounds German.
Ryan: Exactly what I’m thinking.
So, there you go. I can tell you that each dish was about the size of Roxana, so neither of us ate again for 10 or so hours. And they were extremely tasty. THAT’S LUNCH.
I’ll close with some notes about the service at this and other German restaurants we’ve visited. They won’t blow minds, so they won’t get their own post(s), but they’re interesting because they contradict much of what I’ve heard about German food service.
- Waiters and waitresses are friendly. Not as friendly as the ones in Texas, but nobody’s as friendly as those people. The waitress at the restaurant in the photo here actually said goodbye with “schöntag,” which I think is a much sweeter version of “gutentag.” She also smiled a lot. I’ve been told by many that German waiters are standoffish and impatient (seemingly, at least).
- Service seems slow at first, but it’s because waiters are being polite. They don’t check on you during the meal, because they don’t want to interrupt. Once you get the hang of flagging one down and asking for the check, the experience is really smooth. It also means you start spending more time talking to your friends in the restaurant. That’s pretty nice.
Coming up in a future post: Spanish speakers love Munich.