Fifteen Is My Limit On Schnitzengruben.

A word about German food. I don't know why people always say German food is so bad. Walking around downtown last night I noticed plenty of good looking German food including Italian, French, Thai and Greek. True, I also saw an English pub but just because English food is awful is no reason to turn up your nose at all German food.

According to der phrase book, lunch is the big meal in Germany. I don't know where these people are eating their lunch. I'm eating at a Sodhexo cafeteria.

Yesterday at lunch, I chose what to eat based on it appearing edible and it having the shortest line. That would be the Turkish pizza. "What's that," you ask? Well, think of a Gyro and take away the meat and replace it with some orange grease. My CW also chose the same. As the cafeteria worker was putting them together, she eventually asked us "mit brflgugenssuytemwnem". She repeated and pointed at the two bowls of identical white sauces next to her. We assumed she was asking if we wanted sauce. "Yah," we said. She then pointed to one bowl and then the other, the universal sign for "Which sauce, dummy?" My CW pointed at the bowl closer to us. She still didn't get it. By now a line had formed behind us and a starving worker intervened and told us she wanted to know if we wanted sauce with garlic or without. We said "with", he told her "mit" and we were on our way.

Dinner the first night was in the hotel as we were too exhausted to go anywhere. The prices seemed quite reasonable for a hotel until the food arrived. I ordered some kind of chicken farfluggen (don't look that up, it's not the real word) with herbed baked potato. What I got was a chicken breast as small as a pigeon's (a normal pigeon, not a New York pigeon) and a small baked potato in a foil swan. When I finished two bites later, I was wishing I had got a small baked swan wrapped in a foil potato. At 3 that morning I ate one of my emergency nutrition bars.

Breakfast is great. It consists of eggs, bacon, sausage, two kinds of potatoes, squeeze your own OJ, cold cuts, assorted fruits and melons, yogurts, lox, brie and other cheeses. After trying all those I also had a bowl of cereal.

Dinner last night was fish. After sitting and being handed a menu, the host heard us say something and said, "Oh, English menu?" He took our menus and returned with the English ones. As I read it I wondered what delicacies we were missing out on, just like when you go to a Chinese restaurant with some who speaks the language. They order all these wonderful dishes and when you return the next week, those dishes are surely not on your English menu.

I debated between the "sea bars" and the Frankenstein fish (it was a word close to Frankenstein and apparently untranslatable). My CW went for the "salon trout". I decided on the path less traveled but when I asked the waiter (who spoke German, English and Italian) about Frank I did not get a glowing review. I asked for his suggestion and he recommended the three fillet special which was great.

My manager's manager was in town today and took me and my CW to dinner at a place he'd been to before. They had English menus (sans typos). I ordered the "Sausage and freshly slaughtered pig platter." While my adventuresome colleagues had ribs and a big leg of pork (probably slaughtered many days ago). We ordered a round of beers (which came in 1/4 liter glasses, ~8.5 oz. for you lazy Americans).

There were 6 types of meat on my platter. One looked like uncooked ham. One looked like a hot dog. One looked like a small Kielbasa. One looked like a small green turd. And the other two were a light and dark pair of very mushy, metal pinched ended, cylinders of Ipecac. I tasted each one and then ate enough mashed potatoes to plaster a bulimic's stomach. The turd won the battle of "best taste to looks ratio".

They tally your beers with a pencil mark on one of your coasters. In the end we had 29 tics (3 or 4 for me and the rest split between MM and CW, plus 2 rounds of Schnapps (which tasted like root beer syrup in alcohol).

After dinner, we were walking around and I made a joke along the lines of "The German word for venereal disease is Keipudihkotovit* (hey, imagine hearing it after 13 beers). My co-workers at home will need to remind me to tell them the rest of this story (it would not be funny to anyone else).

Must sleep....apologies for spelling/grammar errors. I'm shpent.

* - pronounced "keep you dick out of it" with a German accent