Exchange & Returns ...

As my life settles into living in Waltenhofen I have come to wonder if there is some kind of force working against me in the language stakes …. forcing me into uncomfortable situations, pushing me tino tackling my language skills with everyday occurrences.

Firstly, Ian and I went shopping in our first week of me arriving here. We brought a chest of drawers for the spare room, we took great pains to ensure we didn’t buy the black one on show and brought the white one (as it’s to go into what we call “the white room”). However, we struggled with the two large boxes, loaded it into the car then up two flights of steps into the desire room. The following day, Ian was fairly vocal when he opened up the boxes to discover that our white chest of drawers were in fact blue … not black, not white but blue!???

We briefly discussed taking it back, but apart from the shop being over an hours drive away, there was also no way either of us relished the thought of trying to describe in German how we had managed to pick the wrong colour. So, afraid of pushing ourselves full steam ahead with the German language … we now have a lovely blue chest of drawers in the white room (now commonly known as the blue and white room)!?

Secondly, we brought a glass lamp shade for the bathroom (one of two - bathrooms that is!!) we went home to put it up and as soon as we’d opened the box it was obvious the glass had shattered into thousands of pieces (not by us might I add). Hmmmm ….. we thought we hold onto this for a while before attempting to return it to the shop!?

Thirdly, we attempted to buy some lights for our new kitchen. We brought two lights, both slightly different but from the same range. Last Sunday we attempted to put the first of the two lights up. For those of you who don’t know Ian too well, he doesn’t have much patience for DIY (especially on a Sunday after a stressful week in the office). It took us about three hours to work out a way to hang this light on the ceiling, unfortunately the ceiling is way too solid to drill any substantial holes in. We eventually managed to fudge and dodge it with some wall plugs, the usual match sticks and some polyfiller. Woo hoo … it had stayed put ever since.

Now the issue that we had was that the second light was larger and heavier than the first set. We knew that we wouldn’t be able to use the match sticks and polyfiller to keep this one in place. So …. low and behold we had no other choice but to return it to the shop and ask for our money back.

Dreading taking either light back to the shop, they both sat in our hall way for over a week. Eventually we were forced to go to the shop, armed with my pocket translator (thanks Stralfors) and a pocket dictionary just in case. Now bearing in mind, that my confidence for the German language during this particular week was pretty low, you can imagine that neither of us was looking forward to this trip.

However, Ian and I strolled into the shop, walked up to the customer service desk and straight out of my mouth (in German) came the words ….. “We brought this last week but when we got home it was broken, can we please exchange it for another light shade. And we would also like our money back for this item.” ….. Ian was more than a little surprised. He doesn’t need to know that I had been practising all week, working out my words and phrases etc!!??

Neither of us could believe it when they replaced the bathroom light and gave us our money back on the other item. Suddenly all that money spent on private German lessons in the UK had not been a complete waste.

This all came a few days after one particularly difficult day where I could have quite easily packed up and driven all the way back to England there and then. I had been food shopping, but when I got to the till I discovered that I had not weighed all my fruit as veg … nobody had told me I had to do this!??? So I then had to hold up the entire queue while I slipped away to weigh all my veggies. Then to top that day off, I nearly killed myself on the motorway on the way home …. It wasn’t my fault I didn’t see the car driving along at 120 mph!!!!!!

I guess there are good days and occasionally bad days … but as long as the good days are plenty then I’m doing alright.

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