Toast

In Germany, they don't eat sandwiches. This might seem like a problem only when you are in Germany (what do people eat for lunch, if they don't sell sandwiches anywhere?) But it can also prove a problem when you have Germans visiting, who try to help.

The boys had a birthday party, on Friday (which I've nearly recovered from enough to write about). We wanted to make sandwiches, and B, Oma's pal (whom I am supposed to call Frau Kaiser; S thinks it's OK for me to go into her bedroom and rifle through her underwear looking for stuff I'm supposed to take to work, but not to call her by her first name) decided to help.

But (and I know this is hard to believe) she didn't know how to make sandwiches. She took each slice of bread, cut the crusts off, cut it in half, diagonally, and buttered it, and then tried to cut a slice of cheese so that it fitted. Then she put it on the plate. (Yes, that's right, she didn't put another piece on top). I think S tried to explain that sandwiches involved two piece of bread, so she then made sandwiches, but by basically the same procedure, cutting the crusts off each slice, cutting in half, and then cutting a slice of cheese so it fitted, and putting them together. I tried to explain in my rather feeble German "Erste machen, dann Schnitzen" but she just carried on. S thinks that that is because she was so shocked that I called her by her first name, she was unable to listen to anything else I said. I think it's because she didn't have any idea what I was talking about.

The German word for sliced bread is 'toast'. The German word for toast is 'toast'. This kind of makes sense - if you don't eat sandwiches, the only use for sliced bread is to make toast, but it's caused confusion before - such as when Oma writes 'toast' on the shopping list, and the only kind of toast that they sell in Sainsbury's is that hard French stuff, so I buy it, and she can't understand why there's no bread, and I can't understand why she didn't write it on the shopping list. Anyway, we all woke up late this morning (not quite recovered from the party), and so we were in a hurry. I usually get slices of bread from the freezer, leave them to defrost on the breadboard, and do other stuff while they defrost, then I make sandwiches for the boys.

So I do this, as normal. But when I turn around, Oma has toasted them. She thinks this is normal - after all, I got toast from the freezer. So, I try to explain that I didn't want the toast toasted, because even though she thinks it's toast, I think it's bread, and I'm going to make some of that weird foreign mysterious food called a sandwich. So I get more bread from the freezer, put it on the breadboard, andgo about my business. Now, with leaving time mere minutes away, I go to pack the boys' lunches. But, yes, you've guessed it, my bread is in the toaster, and is nicely toasted. I fling it into the sink (Oma gets it out again, a few bubbles won't allow her to let good toast go to waste) and get more frozen bread out of the freezer, which I make into frozen sandwiches.

If I were to go into a bit of self-psychoanalysis and introspection, the reason this offends me so is because of an incident that happened (naturally) when I was a child. I think that a number of incidents involving packed lunches have scarred me, and this is just one of them. (Another involves my yogurt breaking open, and me being upset about this, while other children look on and laugh because I pronounce if to rhyme (almost) with Bogart. My mother was Canadian, and so said yogurt this way - I've speant years fighting the urge to call it yoagurt, and trying to remember to call it yoggert. A f then we move to America, and I have to try to call it yoagurt again, so our boys aren't scorned at school for being weirdo outsiders.)

But I was going to tell you about the frozen bread. I was (I'd guess) about 13 and we were going on a caoch trip to Londom. (I think it was a own twinning thing, where lots of French/German people came to stay, and we had to do something to amuse them). So we made egg sandwiches. And we (well, mum, let's assign blame where it's due for the psychological damage this caused) thought we should freeze the sandwiches. That way, when we arrived in London, they would be cool and pleasant, not warm and disgusting. So, we arrived in London, and prepared to eat our cool yummy egg sandwiches. Except they weren't cool, they were frozen.

We left the sandwiches on the coach, thinking that when we got back for the journey home we would have cool, delicious sandwiches to eat. When we got back to the coach, the sandwiches had attracted enormous amounts of condensation, and were soggy balls of mush. And I was sad (and, obviously, damaged).