Automobiles and Fun with Language

Since the automobile was invented in Germany, it seemed natural to visit the renowned Mercedez-Benz Museum in Stuttgart. Although I'm married to an engineer specializing in combustion, cars (or any mechanical item) are not my thing, so I was surprised to find the museum quite interesting. It documents the history of the automobile and how social trends influenced automobile development (and vice versa). It also unequivocally points out that, during the horrors of WWII, the company cooperated fully and unhesitatingly with the leadership of the Third Reich, including using up to 30,000 forced laborers. The kids enjoyed taking many photos of impressive cars, and at least one of us admits to being enamoured with the just-too-cute Smartcar.

We continue to have fun with the language here. One German word for driving, going, or travelling is "fahren," and a form of this is "fahrt," so you can imagine what the kids do with that one. The name of each city's town hall building, or seat of government, seems aptly named "Rathaus" (actually pronounced something like rot-hows). In addition, when we visited Rothenburg, the infamous (at least, in travel writer Rick Steves' opinion) treat Schneeballen (shnay-ball-en, "snowballs") are marketed everywhere. Schneeballen are globs of pie dough, baked and covered with powdered sugar, cinnamon sugar, chocolate frosting, or some other glop, and I agreed with Steves that they were highly overrated (but Daniel did not). So when we saw a building called Schneeballen Traumhaus, I joked with Daniel that it was a trauma center for all the Schneeballen victims. (Though I have seen the word "trauma" used here as in the U.S., "traumhaus" actually means "dream house.")