Fish Out of Water

For those of you who know my wonderful husband Wade...he is a take charge kind of guy. He knows where he is going and what he is doing at all times. He is a planner, so he can respond with confidence in many situations because he has probably already 'researched' the death out of it. Case in point...if he ever decides he wants to purchase something, he not only knows it is a good price (he's kept his eye on it for at least 6 months) but he knows if we can afford it because he keeps track of every red cent we spend. Yes, every penny. Even if I buy dental floss, it has a category and he can tell you how much we've spent on that category last week, last year, or for the last 7 years. And it's all tallied on his precious Quicken. So going to Germany was no different. He read book after book and web sight after web sight about what to see and how to see it. He polled family members and friends who'd been, what they thought about seeing castles vs museums and on and on. So needless to say, Wade was once again prepared for anything on this trip. But planning to be in Germany and actually being in Germany is another thing entirely. For the first time, Wade was out of his element. He was finally for the first time in our marriage of 9 years, a fish out of water. Now, don't get me wrong, I love the guy completely but seeing him trying to communicate with someone who has no clue what he was saying and he had no clue what they were saying was comical to say the least. No this isn't to say that Wade didn't try to communicate in the native tongue of Germany. Someone said, "Guten tag" ('good day' in german) to him one day and without skipping a beat, he said, "Hola!" Later, I over heard him saying, "Ein Bisschen" to someone. I asked him what he was doing and he said, "I was saying, 'thank you very much' to that nice person." I hated to burst his bubble that he was actually saying, 'a little.' Eventually, Wade just decided that I should just do all the talking because as you well know, 2 years of high school German does make one fluent. Right? Then since I was taking care of all the talking, albeit how elementary it was, Wade decided that he would just enjoy the funny sounds of the german language. Wade noticed that the word, 'verboten' was in bold type most places we went. It means, prohibited, not allowed. Or as Wade likes to think, forbidden. Wade just kept saying the word over and over again. Das ist verboten(that is prohibited, forbitten). Verboten this, verboten that. Verboten that, verboten this. Well, one day while we were in an art musuem an old security guard came up to Wade and pointed to the baby back pack on Wade's back and said, "blah blah, blah, blah blah, VERBOTEN!" It was all we could do to not burst out laughing. Wade looked at me and said, "Well, the guy said 'verboten,' I guess that's that." We were snickering so much we couldn't argue. Verboten had been evoked; the law had been laid down!