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Plates are preferable.

Baldur

In my diverse reading I keep running into Latin, I've actually gotten pretty good at divining translations out of thin air.

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I agree with you about Latin. It's the key to mosy Euroean languages.

sheftali52

Ah, Deutschland--I was fortunate to live there for five years thanks to Uncle Sam. Loved every minute of it. Still have dear German friends who don't mind my disjointed spoken German, and yes, they speak English very well. My favorite time of year there was Christmas--they celebrate with such joy.

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Ah! Christkindlmarkt ... yes, always a good time to be there.
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Baldur

On my next once-and-future European trip I really need to go to the UK.
Baldur wants to see everything there is to be seen about William & Jane Morris, Dante Gabriel Rossetti and the whole coven of Pre-Raphaelites that surrounded them

Baldur

There was a man roasting chestnuts over a fire in a big metal barrel. I bought a sack of them and then found to my delight that my friends loathe chestnuts. Baldur didn't have to share.

Baldur

I also want to go to Scotland and get some Harris tweed trousers and possibly a waistcoat made for me. I have a few jackets but finding anything else in the states is nye on impossible.

lilalee

I flunked Latin, and I went to a Catholic school!

sheftali52

Sheftali doesn't share her chestnuts, either. I ate them from street vendors in both Greece and Germany, and loved them. Only, in Greece, everyone threw the debris on the ground (sheftali did not), and in Germany no one threw anything on the ground.

sheftali52

Believe it or not, sheftali also took a couple years of Latin, in a public high school in Hawaii. Of course, that was many years ago. Somehow, I doubt Latin is still offered in the school I attended. I didn't necessarily see the utility of Latin at the time, but have come to appreciate it as an adult.

Baldur

Back in grade school I just barely missed Latin. It was required starting in the first grade but the requirement was changed just as I started school.
Then it was required starting in the third grade and guess what? They changed it again just as I got there.
It was offered in high school but I opted to take Spanish.
By my Junior year I had some room on my schedule and could have added Latin but took mechanical drawing instead.
Have to say I really enjoyed that class.

Baldur

One instinctively knows never ever to thrown anything on the ground in Germany. One never sees litter there.

Baldur

-n =throw

I think they wash and polish the streets nightly.

Baldur

I loved the farmer's market in the Marketplatz in every city.
To save funds we bought fruit there with cheese and bread for lunch.
We quickly decided to spend less on lunch when we discovered the joys of the Konditorei. We needed the money for cocoa and vanillekipferl

sheftali52

You are so correct, Baldur, about no one even thinking about throwing trash on the ground in Germany. I tell my friends that I never saw a dirty car or window when I was in Germany. Clean, clean, clean. One morning, I looked out the second story window in the house I rented in Altenglan, and watched the neighbor lady wash her window sill. Soap and water, and she scrubbed and washed it down twice. You could have eaten off that window sill. And she washed the front steps every day, too. I tried to keep up with the neighbors so they wouldn't think we were bad Americans, but I never washed my window sills like she did.

Baldur

I was driving through a part of the Black Forest and saw an old women picking up sticks that had fallen from the trees. She was not far off the road but probably had walked quite a distance.
Her outfit was a peasant sort of skirt and she had a kerchief tied on her head. As she found them she added the sticks to a huge bundle on her back.
It was rather like a scene in a fairy tale

Some time after leaving her behind in her task we noticed that there were no sticks or branches lying around on the ground anywhere.
There was no underbrush for that matter.
You could see quite a distance into the forest and the ground looked as if it were raked clean

sheftali52

Your story about the old woman picking up sticks rings so true. I also remember all the vege gardens in Germany. All the rows were perfectly straight, and I never saw a weed (I swear it's true!) amongst them. I tried to grow a small garden in Germany, and despite my efforts, it never looked as good as the locals'.

Dragon

I would so love to travel in europe. I do have a little french as here in Canada it's a mandatory course, but most of us don't speak much of it or very well (it's only madatory from grade 3-6 so that doesn't really do much for you unless you take extra courses)
I'd really love to go to Italy and I want to learn at least a little Italian first (at one point I had learned how to say in Italian 'I don't speak Japanese' but that isn't really very helpful -- but the word Japanese is really fun to say in Italian)

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