Ein Doppelzimmer bitte

Well, what a tiring day. As I was the only person who can speak German in work today, I got to spend all day trying to find accommodation for Dr Koch (a name which caused much sniggering amongst my colleagues) who is flying in from Berlin tonight. I won't go into all the dull details, but it involved lots of phonecalls and emailing. I finally got him booked in somewhere at a quarter past five. He had first phoned at 10.10!! I just hope it's all in ordnung and I don't go into work tomorrow to find something has gone wrong with the booking.

It was good to get to use my German, well, what little of it I have retained. I think that was the first time I had spoken to a proper German person on the phone. It was certainly the first time I'd emailed a proper German person. I didn't really know what way to write the email, whether I should use a format like in a letter and write Lieber or Sehr Geehrter or something. I've even forgotten how to set out a letter in German. Hard to believe I once did Stage 2 German Word Processing!!

Interestingly and annoyingly I discovered today that there is no phrase in German for "expiry date" as in the expiry date on a credit card. My colleague told me that she had asked one of our staff who is a native German one day and she said they just use the english for it. I find it very odd that there isn't a word or words in German for it. I thought that "Endes datum" or something would be used.

Hmmm......it's funny that there aren't words in German for things in English and vice versa. I mean there is no English word for "schadenfreude" and I can't think of any other examples right now, but there are lots of German words that don't translate into English and have to be explained by a phrase.

Ah, languages are so strange and interesting.