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Tuesday, November 25, 2008

Cate can't get her head around Zwolf


My second German lesson went well but we still haven’t moved on to meat. My teacher is a traditionalist and thinks that I need to learn grammar and verbs and stuff like that.

I will finish the first book by the end of December and my teacher says that I will be able to do most things in Wien in German.

I have asked her if it will help me get the car but she is not confident so I will keep buying lottery tickets (I missed out on the Skoda Octavia).

But I have moved ahead in the meat department in leaps and bounds lately. I can with a reasonable degree of accuracy identify and buy beef and chicken of various types. I did have a bit of a disaster with bacon today but can recover from that because it is going into a beef hotpot and Cate will not be able to identify it by the time I have finished.

I did ask for bacon at Spar and he asked me something incomprehensible (it could have been ‘have you got your car yet?”) and I said yes. He then sliced it so finely you could watch TV through it - and it dissolved when I put in into the hotpot – but I am sure it will taste just fine.

I am more worried about some other vegetables which are supposed to be in there but which I could not find. I have put in substitutes – the names of which I shall not mention because Cate reads the blog and will say something like ‘I thought that tasted like X – you should never put X into a hotpot as it gives it a funny flavour’.

Cate is going to start her German lessons in December after she finishes her next round of trips. We have already started informally and she can say ‘Bitte’ ‘Danke’ ‘Gruss Gott’ and ‘Enschuldigung’ – and can count up to 11. We have been stuck on 11 for a month or so because she can’t get her head around Zwolf but will keep plugging away and hope to be at 14 by Christmas Eve.

We just have to hope that she doesn’t have an urgent need for 12 of something between now and then. She would have to ask for 11 and then for 1 and this may cause massive confusion.

We have settled at the moment on a blend of coffee called ‘Caruso’ which we get from Alt Wien in Schleifmuhlgasse. It is fabulous stuff and makes our hearts sing in the morning. Well not really but you get the picture.

We had a another fire last night and watched the last 4 episodes of season 3 of 24. This is truly the silliest TV program I have ever seen (apart from I Dream Of Jeannie) – but is addictive. It is worth watching just for the laugh out loud moments as improbable situation follows farcical moment as the bunch of hapless stooges in CTU save us from yet another mad terrorist.

CTU makes the Bush Presidency seem like a monument to careful planning, prudent management and sound judgement.

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