I forgot that stores aren’t open on Sundays here. I have two bananas, five slices of bread, ½ cup of basmati rice, a 75ml can of tomato paste, ¼ of a wheel of Camembert cheese, a jar of chicken bullion, and for some reason, lots of butter. Fortunately, the people on my floor are having a cookout on the balcony, to which Jĭrkĭ has invited me. I have absolutely no idea how to pronounce his name, but that doesn’t stop him from being my favorite person today. He’s also the guy who signed for my Eurail pass when it came via FedEx, so he already had pretty favorable status as far as I was concerned.
Yesterday I ended up having that picnic with Maria, Claudia, and German student from the Fachhochshule, Phillip. I was going to invite some of the other Kettering folks as well, but I think I was the only one who was in Konstanz that day. I met Phillip a week or two ago through Kurt at a party thrown at one of the dormitories near the FH. When I discovered he owned a guitar, he became my insta-friend. I don’t want to sound like I’m only friends with Philip because he has a guitar – he’s really a cool guy anyway – but how can I not appreciate a guitar player? He told me to give him a call sometime if I wanted to come by and use his guitar, so I called him up yesterday and told him he should join us for lunch by the river and bring the guitar with him.
We arrived at the river, armed with sandwich material and some tasty chocolate and cookie morsels Maria picked up from Kaufland, and found Phillip with guitar and blanket in hand. Oh, how I’ve missed my guitar! I was so excited to get to play again. Phillip and I swapped off playing songs until both of us had exhausted our repertoires, at which point Maria and Claudia, perhaps a little begrudgingly, entertained us with a few Romanian songs. After each of us had partially recovered from our food comas, we broke camp and headed home, but with me in possession of the guitar. Phillip doesn’t play it that well and only practices it occasionally, so he said I could borrow it for a while, and when he gets the fancy to play it, he’ll just call me up and ask for it back. Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy!
When I hang around with Maria and Claudia, I usually end up talking mostly to Claudia, since she speaks very good English, while Maria speaks very good French, but only a little English, German and Spanish. When Maria and I do talk, it’s usually in a combination of the latter three languages, but I think we both find it difficult to get our point across. Anyway, Friday evening I wrote a little letter to both of them in German, inviting them to have lunch the next day. Though I can hardly speak at all in German, I can write well enough to get my point across, since I have time to think and to look up words when I’m writing. Anyway, Maria happened to be home when I dropped the note off, so she read it while I waited and said she’d be happy to go. Later in the evening after we’d come back from the picnic, I found a note tucked into the jamb of my door. Apparently Maria had been so delighted that I’d written that letter in German for her benefit, she returned the favor with a note in Spanish, apologizing that she doesn’t talk very much, since she doesn’t speak English, Spanish or German very well (though I think she probably speaks the latter two better that I do), but thanking me for the picnic and the entertainment on the guitar. It was an incredibly sweet gesture – not to mention her handwriting looks like a work of art.
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