Wetter
It rains a lot here. It rains a whole lot here. It rains a whole #*!?$! lot here. It rains, on average, twelve to fourteen feet a year here… I think. It’s raining now, by the way. But that’s only the first part of the story.
A friend of mine came to visit me last year. He wanted to “do” Europe, as he said, and would be needing a place to stay while visiting Berlin - please. He’s an adult and whatever he “does” in the privacy of his own four walls or his hotel room or at another friend’s house is none of my business really but I did point out to him that he would not be “doing” any Europe while staying at my place thank you. But that’s only the second part of the story.
The final part of the story has to do with the fact that he can’t speak a word of German. Not one. He’s kind of like Will except Will has been known to occasionally make sounds that at least sound like German. This guy doesn’t even try and certainly doesn’t care. I don’t care, either. Like I said, he’s a friend.
But… He’s a friend who came in out of the rain. It was raining the day he arrived and it continued raining right up until the day he climbed aboard the train to Munich one week later (this was in the summer, too, by the way). And, being an American, he was always watching TV here, or trying to. He wouldn’t let me shut the damned thing off, either, even though the only stuff he could follow was CNN and BBC. Talk about desperate.
At any rate, one night I’m watching the national news show here, they call it Die Tagesschau. He’s pacing around the living room (still a bit damp from our excursion that afternoon), breathing down my neck, asking for a translation every two minutes. And at the end of the news, well, they always do the weather. It’s called Wetter here, the weather (pay attention here, folks).
And that’s when my buddy caught on that it was the weather report (all by himself) and saw the word Wetter. “What?” he cried. “How can it possibly get any wetter here than it is already?”
And that’s the rest of the story.
