Don’t recall reading that 8 degrees C were on special offer, but it was rather parky
Mainz has a coloured history – Romans, Franks, Vandals, Swedes, Austrians, French all turned up at some stage and stayed for various periods of time – but it’s the bleu-blanc-rouge…
Riding through the fields in Hechtsheim can be quite traumatic….
“Waste not, want not” is what my granddad used to say. Sloppy stuff seen during the Grumbeerernte*. Local dialect for “potato harvest” What was that? You thought they’re called Kartoffeln…
The first day at school in Germany is quite something. Kiddies with a year or more under their belts front up on the first day after the summer holidays and…
Bloody Germans, using “Haka” as a registered trademark. Not only is it a knock-off of Ha-Ra (the original micro-fibre cleaning concept), but they’ve usurped the Maori traditional ancestral war cry,…
If you’re short of the folding stuff, this is likely where you’ll spend your vacation. In Balkonien, Balkon being German for “balcony”. Cuts down on jet-lag, that’s for sure…
One and a half bubbles out of plumb? Silly as a 10 bob watch? Not the sharpest knife in the drawer? Or dumb as a bag of hammers? That’s what…
The Nasengässchen (Nose Alley) links Leichhof (the site of the original church cemetery, Leiche meaning corpse) and Grebenstrasse (possibly originating from Graben, a ditch) in the Altstadt. There are heaps…
The Germans are quite good at euphemisms. not to mention double entendres. The university’s Botanic Garden Summer Festival featured a number of stands selling plants suited to specific conditions –…
(-ray) marks the spot. You’d be surprised at all the things that the locals have invented over time- X-Ray by Wilhelm Röntgen Refrigeration by Gottfried Linde The theory of…
…….tails you lose. With a name like van Leeuwen and a Twitter name of @avlmelbourne, it’s fair to assume that my friend Andrew is a likely to be a tad…
Rock on over to the Picolla Salumeria to buy some Finocchiona (that’s fennel salami to you… €2.09/100gm) and you get a free Italian lesson to go…
…if not multilingual in Mainz….
…nichts los. Moos (moss) – apart from Bryophyta above – derives an alternative meaning from a Yiddish word for money. So the idiom translates roughly to..
…it means “at the excavate” Given that it’s part of a display outside the Johanniskirche, I don’t think it’s Portuguese….
A big fail. You’ll need to have lived in Rhoihesse for a few years to master this stuff.
Looking at the goldsmith across the road from Kaffeekommunezwei, I was quietly wishing that my Italian was a bit better. Like” what’s a “Heib”? “Che cosa è una Heib?” I thought.…
…there’s a way. Reusable shopping bags from the ever-excellent Shakespeare & So in the Gaustrasse. True story: Ms jb’s English is so excellent, because her mother (would have been her…
..and all I got was this lousy postcard. Which I can’t read….
Rudi and Kerstin Baumann have run “Zum goldenen Adler” (these days, a traditional village restaurant serving simple, good food, but at times during its 170 year history, it was the…
…the same as “ice fishing”? A couple more days of this and I might be able to take advantage of the linguistic nuances…
On the market the other day at the Sicilian stand – Signora Anna whose hair must have chameleon DNA, because it changes colour EVERY week and hubby who looks as…
Translation as (pdf) here ….in the summer (if you can call it that…) of the Year MMXI that the renowned bird scribess Cibus Mercator of the Moguntiae Genera Papyrus did…
..is having a Reduziert. If you have to translate [übersetzen]your advertising [Werbung] into your customers’ own language [Sprache], you’ve got the wrong advertising agency [Werbeagentur]. Linguistic fail.
Mainz Daily Photo 