Wetter
Days like today bring everybody down. It rains a lot here in Berlin. It rains a whole lot here. It rains a whole f-lot here, as a matter of fact. It rains, on average, twelve to fourteen feet a year here, I think. It’s raining now, by the way, and it’s been raining ALL DAY LONG. But that’s only the first part of the story.
A friend of mine came to visit me last year. He wanted to “do” Europe, as he said, and would be need a place to stay while visiting town, pretty please. He’s an adult and whatever he “does” in the privacy of his own four walls or his hotel room or at another friend’s house is none of my business really but I did point out to him that he would not be “doing” any Europe while staying at my place thank you. But that’s only the second part of the story.
The final part of the story has to do with the fact that he can’t speak a word of German. Not one. He’s kind of like my brother who can actually speak two or three words of German and even occasionally makes these two or three words sound like German a bit sort of, but this other guy doesn’t even try and certainly doesn’t care. I don’t care, either. Like I said, he’s a friend. So why am I stressing all of this?
I do so because he was also a friend who came in out of the rain. It was raining the day he arrived and it continued raining right up until the day he climbed aboard the train to Munich a week later (this was in the spring, too, by the way). And, being an American, he was always watching TV here, or trying to. He wouldn’t let me shut the damned thing off, as a matter of fact, even though the only stuff he could follow was CNN and BBC. Talk about being desperate for television.
At any rate, one night I’m watching the national news show here, they call it Die Tagesschau. He’s pacing around the living room, still a bit damp from our excursion that afternoon, breathing down my neck, asking for a translation every two minutes and bugging me to switch it back to CNN. And then at the end of the news, well, they always do the weather. It’s called Wetter here, the weather. The German word for weather is Wetter (pay attention here, folks).
And that’s when my buddy caught on that it was the weather report (all by himself) and saw the word Wetter. “What?” he cried. “How can it possibly get any wetter here than it is already?”
And that’s the rest of the story.