My whites were getting dingier by the week after a month living in Germany and washing clothes in the Tumblingerstr. apartment public laundry room. Alex’s all-purpose man detergent wasn’t helping either so I went to the Tenglemann grocery store on a domestic mission. How hard could it be to find a detergent for whites or in worse case, bleach?

At the time my German was limited. In my language class I had reached a new low when I couldn’t play a proper game of “Where’s Doloris?” All things soap clearly had to wait until I could properly say in German, “you are standing in front of or sitting next to me”. However I was armed with the knowledge on basic colors in German and that shampoo is Shampoo and conditioner is Spülung. In the end I bought, Weiss-Spüler, because in heza-logic Spüler is very close to Spülung and therefore, I imaged white clothes with a silky soft feel.

Lucky for me I waited until Alex arrived from Regensburg to do the laundry. He nearly flipped out when he saw the bottle on top of a pile of dirty whites in a basket. Clearly the word Gardinenneu had some major significance I managed to neglect. I just assumed it was a brand name or denoted a garden scent, perhaps? I mean, the focus here was that ding of sparkle just below the word Weiss. surely?

The German habit of shoving as many words as possible together and saving a few millimeters of text spaces takes some getting used to. Gardinenneu spread out is actually Gardinen neu and Gardinen has nothing to do with gardens rather drapes, specifically the white oma drapes you find everywhere in Bavaria, and none that we personally own. This stuff was designed to make the drapes look new again.

My German liaison came to the rescue! Had I used the Gardinenneu on my white laundry, I would have impregnated the clothing with a type of plastic leaving it to feel a little stiff and heavy albeit fully protected against nicotine smoke or sunlight and lastly, brilliant white!

I made sure I paid attention from then on. Only when I couldn’t prepare myself for a spontaneous question did I find myself again in an almost snafu German situation. A flustered elderly woman in a Rossmann’s was apparently so overwhelmed by the towering wall of toothpaste products that she had to verbally break out in disgust. Maybe she couldn’t see too good. All I could make out was the repeated word Haftcreme.

The word Creme I understood, but Haft heh, what was that? What sprung to my mind -the game Monopoly and the square that tells a player to ‘go to jail’ -indicates how scattered I can be at times.

How I then arrived at the conclusion I should direct the old woman to another store section because she was really looking for shoe cream is another matter, which needed no further examination because someone came along to clear up my internal misunderstanding. She wasn’t plotting to rob a bank or play quarterback for the local American football team. The poor woman was in need of denture adhesive.

[the box says, “Extra starker Haft den ganzen Tag”. Spend a rough day in the slammer?]

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