Could one stay indoors, at home, all locked up, for an entire Saturday? Hell no! Not on a fine day like today. Sunny with sparse clouds and a light gust of wind. I was off to Real, again. Somehow having done an expense account, I realise I have been doing a lot of groceries. But my cupboard is empty. Whatever on earth have I been buying?!
It's probably a phase I'm going through. You know, since I'm so free and all at the moment. Familiarising myself with the arrangements and layouts of things in supermarkets. With German words like hackfleisch or taschentücher or even akkusauger (now these words are just a few easy ones)! If you do a google translate on a word like taschentücher, you would be getting "Kleenex". While a word like akkusauger would translate to battery sucker. That's just bizarre. Even the translator gets confused! There actually is however, a very good explanation to this all (maybe except the Kleenex). You see, the Germans tend to combine a few words into one fat one whereby akku is actually battery and sauger is vacuum so an akkusauger would be a battery-powered vacuum (which somehow became battery sucker [vacuum]). German words are famed too to be very very very long. For example, geschwindigkeitsbegrenzung simply means speed limit. And another, Höchstgeschwindigkeitsbegrenzung, means maximum (Höchst-) speed limit. See what I mean by the tendency of die Deutschen combining words into one massive meatball of a tongue twisting wordzilla? How do you even pronounce that?! Well enough with that, the conclusion is that doing groceries do add miles to the understanding of this language.
During my first week here, I was looking out for a bottle of detergent. It got so confusing it drove me mad! I would spend minutes (not seconds) trying to figure out if it's a detergent or softener or enhancer or what-have-you. So many choices where one is for colour and another for white or another is for jeans. Too many choices!! I was so confused I bought a bottle in the neighbourly country (not really due to the confusion but probably cause it was cheaper, and I understood what I was buying, heh)! And it's usable for both white and colour. Quite the stuff I'm used to at home. Never knew it would be so hard to buy detergent. Maybe it's just me.
Now doesn't that look like a bottle of detergent then?
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