Tote Hose

I’m the kind of guy who needs a full eight hours of sleep everything. If I don’t get the eight hours, bad things start to happen.

So it was no great surprise that after four hours of sleep Friday night Saturday morning and five hours of sleep Sunday morning, that early this evening, I was exhausted.

Yes, I just woke up from a deep, and I do mean deep, two hour nap—and I am still tired.

I won’t bore you with too many specifics of my Saturday and Sunday.

Saturday: wake, Coffee Culture, shopping, wandering, shopping, eating, lost pencil sharpener, bought pencil sharpener, brief nap attempt, Coffee Culture, bagels, Döner, brief nap attempt, clubbing.

Sunday: wake, realize my old shoes really should have been trashed, train, home, new shoes, Weimar Office, dinner, deep nap, and now blogging.

My time at the Weimar Office was most pleasant, and site of today’s brief German lesson. Chicago Anki was working the machine—although, strictly speaking, she was cleaning for the first hour I was there, interrupting cleaning to make a few drinks and assist customers. When she wasn’t busy talking to customers, she was talking to me.

OK- That sounds weird. Yes, I am a customer, but when she was talking to customers she was speaking German, to me it was English. The weaving of languages didn’t bother me, since I am still able to passively ignore German, I worked on my project unless the conversation was in English. I fear the day I know enough German that I cannot easily ignore other conversations. In Leipzig I found myself listening to a girl talking on the phone in English when I would have preferred ignoring her.

Anyhow, at one point she was talking to other Café Laden employees, when she noted it was “tote Hose,” or “dead pants.”

It seems that in the restaurant biz in Germany, if the shop is devoid of customers, the special phrase for this situation is “dead pants.” I laughed and shared the English idiom, which in my experience is “dead.”

Oddly enough, not ten minutes later several large groups of people came into the shop occupying not just the ground floor, but the smoker’s “living room” up on the first floor.

It was a good thing that all the dishes were clean at this point because for the next hour, until 3 o’clock, when I left, she was slammed—some kind of cosmic karmic reaction to her observation that it was “tote Hose.”