What Happens When You Shower In Germany Without Knowing How To Read German Product Labels
I don’t have any story quite as funny as this from my travels. But this brings back to my memory the time I was standing in a German grocery store trying to decide between two bars of Milka chocolate. The first one was “haselnuss” and the second was “trauben-nuss.” Both had a picture of a hazelnut on them, so I was clearly perplexed as to what the difference was (it turns out that trauben is fruit and there was also a picture of fruit on the package; unfortunately, it was being covered by the display case).
Anyway, it didn’t help that at this point I had been alone in Germany for a week, it was raining hard, and during my week in Germany, I had had a reasonable amount of difficulty finding people that knew how to speak English (or wanted to speak English to me). Regardless, for some reason, this was the “breaking point” (but not in a particularly bad way) for me and I started to laugh rather uncontrollably in the middle of a supermarket in Cologne while the Germans looked at me as if I was the crazy American that needed to be watched closely. While it was not exactly an amazing experience at the time, it definitely ranks among the most memorable experiences of my European monomyth.
You wind up using “aloe vera” shampoo for five days before your boyfriend points out that it’s for dogs.
