You Don't Speak German!

I was playing with the Google Translator app on the tablet at some point between Berlin and Hamburg when I made an alarming discovery.

When traveling in a country where we are unfamiliar with the language, which would be most of them, we had tried to ensure that we could at least manage a botched version of the basics: hello, yes, no, thank you, two beers please, can I use your toilet, and the ever-necessary I'm sorry, I don't speak German/Portugese/Spanish/Italian.

It is on this final point we were having difficulty, although we had no idea. For weeks now, when someone addressed us in German we would shake our heads and say, apologetically but with moderate confidence, some of the few German words we had mastered:

"Sorry, nein sprechensie Deutsch." "Sorry, I don't speak German". We had heard and understood this somewhere in our travels and now used it many times a day.

But nearly every time, there would be a pause, and then the Germans would cock their heads and say, "Bitte?" rather quizzically. Which means, "excuse me?"

We would repeat ourselves, assuming poor pronounciation, at which point they would either give up entirely or recommence in English.

What I discovered with the translator was that in fact to say, "I don't speak German," you say, "Keine spreche Deutsch."

It turns out that for weeks we had been saying, "YOU don't speak German!" with bad grammar, to boot. Which explains all the "bitte" nonsense.

Sorry, Germany. Anyway, on with the story.

After our flurry of touristing in Berlin, on reaching Hamburg, we were ready for a change. So our first evening in town, exploring the waterfront (street beers in hand, of course) accidentally turned into racous night out.

We managed to make it cost-effective by buying beers from kiosks. Hamburg's notorious red light district, just north of the river in St. Pauli, is entertaining enough to just wander. Tragically I lost my dollar store sunglasses, although why I wore them in the first place is still unknown. We left the hostel after dark. I blame the tequila-beer. Always blame the tequila-beer.

Half drunk and peckish, we stumbled into the Portugese quarter (surprise!) and delighted, feasted on shrimp and olives and bread. Good lord do I miss Portugese food.

Jan, who we'd visited in Frankfurt, was in Hamburg for work, so we met up and had a fantastic breakfast at a café near our hostel. Afterwards we got transit passes for the day - in Hamburg, an all day pass is also valid for the ferries, so we spent most of our final afternoon taking various ferry lines across the river and into the interior of the port.

We weren't quite ready to leave Germany, so we decided to spend the weekend camping in Bremen, near the Dutch border.




A massive park stretches five kilometres north from the centre of town, full of paths and canals and forest. Our campsite was on the north end of the park, so we rented bikes and enjoyed our commutes, rather than busing back and forth.

Bremen's medieval centre is preserved, largely because during the second world war, there was a port just north on which the air raids were focused. The two churches at the centre are twelve and eight hundred years old, respectively. Under the larger of the two, there is a display of bodies that were mummified by the extremely dry conditions in the church's crypt. Cool, albeit slightly creepy.

We ate 'goodbye Germany' currywurst in the main station on Sunday morning (yes, morning.) and then we were off to new adventures in a new and even more confusing language: time to break out the Dutch!

S.