Pick-A-Day

September 2008
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Early Morning TV

Sometimes I have trouble sleeping–it comes in waves and the past week I’ve had issues.

This morning my alarm was set to go off at 6, so that I could catch a train to Utrecht at 7, making sure that I caught my ICE International–I didn’t trust the concept of a four minute connection. Really, overall the trip was uneventful, save for the moron cashier at Albert Heijn who told me it was my fault that the package I picked up didn’t have a bar code.

Brief Aside:

Dear Albert Heijn Express To-Go store clerk,

You don’t tell the customer it’s his fault that he picked up a package without a bar-code, nor do you ask the customer to go over and get one when he’s carrying a briefcase, dragging a suitcase, and trying to get his wallet out.

I was serious when I congratulated you on reaching your career peak potential at such a young age.

Adam

Anyhow, I actually woke up at 5, and decided to watch TV, finding myself following the adventures of a Romanian man who had moved to Cologne and was learning German. His German was good enough to get a job as a runner at “Deutschland Plus,” a fictional television station. Amazingly, I actually understood 80-90% of what was being said.

I do have to say that I thought it was unfair to make the poor guy go buy a (German) pound of coffee at a coffee shop, without telling him which specific kind to get.

On the other hand, the guy was so stupid that in the supermarket when he asked other customers where to find milk–a product I’ve never had a challenge finding. He even asked for help finding it when he was standing arm’s length away from the doggone boxes of milk!

Certainly the German wasn’t complicated, but given how bad I am at learning languages, the fact that I basically understood an hour’s worth of moron-level German on BBC Learning was thrilling.

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