Sprechen Sie Englisch?

Today was our first official day in Germany! We decided to sleep in a little since we were all so tired from the night before. It is also my moms birthday today and I had planned on being the first one to say Happy Birthday to her (the time change is great for things like that!) but we only have 24 hours of free wifi at the hotel so we decided to save it till tonight. But Happy Birthday again, Mom :)

Before I talk about today, I mostly remembered three phrases in German: Ich bin mude, Ich habe hunger, and Ich bin ein berliner. They mean I am tired, I am hungry, and I am a jelly doughnut. Two of those would be kind of helpful! The word I've been using the most has been "Danke" which is "Thank you."

We started our morning at a restaurant for breakfast.... and what a breakfast we had! Anywhere we go we have to ask "Sprechen sie englisch?" to ask if they know any english. Thankfully, everyone knows enough that we can easily communicate. We told the waitress that we wanted something for breakfast, so she told us what she had and we said that sounded good! We sat down and our food was brought to us pretty fast. I didn't realize we had ordered so much! Each of us had 2 plates full of food, plus another basket of bread was brought out.

Our breakfast

We went back to the hotel after that because we had left the map of Hamburg and bus schedule in the room. When we got to the room we realized it was being cleaned, but since we just wanted to grab 2 things I decided to go in and get them real quick. Lesson of the day: if you ever have the chance to make a German boy scream, do it. I walked in and saw the guy cleaning the bathroom so I said "Hi, I just forgot something1" and he went "AH! Oh... sorry. You just scared me!" I had to quickly leave the room so he wouldn't see me laugh. It was just so funny!

Adam and me

Anyway, we took the bus to the shopping area of Hamburg. The buses here are not double deckers like in London, but they are two buses combined. When we got to town we just walked around for a long time. We wanted to find a "tourist-y" store but they don't have them anywhere! If they do, it was not where we were looking. We had heard of a chocolate museum, so we took the Underground to the stop that was right by the museum.





Adam stood in line to buy the tickets while Ellyn and I looked at all the chocolate. Once Adam bought the tickets he found us and told us the whole tour would be in German. Oh... this was going to be interesting. We didn't realize it was a guided tour. We thought it would be a self-guided tour. Oh well! Might as well do it.... there were free samples at the end.

My chocolate bar!

We could not stop laughing over what we were doing. At one point we were given instructions on how to make our own chocolate bars. Since we could only understand bits and pieces of what the tour guide was telling us, we just watched what everyone else was doing. We thought we were doing a good job of fitting in. Another part in the tour we were given two "waffles" (it is what they called them... it is kind of like a wafer in a way) and we were supposed to tell the tour guide if we wanted milk chocolate on them, dark chocolate, or one of each. Well, we panicked. What were we supposed to say! Adam decided he didn't want any because we were given chocolate earlier in the tour. I just said I was going to point at the milk chocolate. Ellyn said she would point at the dark chocolate and then we would give our second one to each other. Perfect! We decided by this point they definitely knew we didn't speak German. The tour was hilarious but it is really hard to explain in words. I took videos of it so I'll post a link later!

The most German-looking building we could find

We decided to make our way back to towards the bus stop to find some dinner. We found a pizza place, but had trouble reading the menu. When our waitress came over, we asked if she spoke english and she did! We asked if she could explain the menu to us, and then she flipped the menu over.... the other side was in english!

We got on a bus back to our hotel and got our 24 hours of free wifi code from the desk. Finally we had internet access!! We leave tomorrow to head back to London, so we just have one more day of trying to figure out what everyone is saying. Probably should have studied my German a little more before I came here.