I went to the local farmer's stand today to get some produce. It's a little weird here; you don't get to pick your produce. Instead, you stand in line and wait your turn to talk to some guy to let him know what you want. Then he puts your produce in a bag and then you pay.
So I wanted funf Apfel und vier Pfirsiche (five apples and four peaches) and ein halb Kilo Kirschen (half a kilogram of cherries). The guy put my apples and peaches in the basket, and then piled the cherries into a paper bag. He gave me my basket and I walked into the store to pay.
When I got up to the counter, I noticed that I had TWO paper bags of produce in addition to my plastic bags of apples and peaches. Both bags had stickers that said the they had about 1/2 a kilo each. I figured that the guy outside gave me two bags of cherries, or one 1/2 kilo too many. I started to tell the guy, using my 100-word vocabulary of German, that I only wanted 1/2 a kilo of cherries. And he looked at the bags and said "OK, you want half kilo, you have half kilo." I kept pointing to the bags as saying, "No I only want ONE 1/2 kilo", and he kept saying "yeah, you get one half kilo" but kept trying to make me pay for both bags. I finally gave up, figuring these guys were trying to take advantage of the dumb American who can't speak German, sticking him with some extra cherries like some dumb schmuck!
Anyway, I got home and was pretty steamed. I told Mrs AI about what happened, and she was pissed that I paid for both bags. I tried to explain to her that I just gave up and something was being lost in translation. I started to put the produce into the fridge, and lo and behold, the second bag didn't have cherries in it at all. Instead, it was filled with Turkish Apricots that the guy outside accidentally put in my basket! No wonder the guy thought I was such a douche for wanting ONLY half a kilo of cherries! Next time I'll be sure to actually look inside the bags!
Man am I an ass...
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment