This is not a ...

When I arrived in my Goethe-arranged lodgings, my hostess announced that the bathroom would be mostly unusable for the next 2 weeks due to its being worked on. There would be no showers. Tonight marks my tenth shower taken sitting down. But wouldn't that be a bath, Majel? Perhaps it should be called shbath. But the point of my bringing this up is to tell you that really, it's neither. Or, rather, the benefits of showering and bathing are both absent with a shbath. You neither experience the stream of water 'n' gravity effect of showering, nor the pool-of-hotness effect of bathing. When shbathing, you sit in an empty tub holding the showerhead in your free hand while the other is busy. There are no soapholders, hooks or ledges in a shbath, so if you put the soap or shampoo or razor down, you had better be ready to then put the showerhead down in order to retrieve the soap/shampoo/razor. It's a lot like trying to put a sock on with one hand. The average shbath lasts anywhere from 20-25 minutes and if you need to wash your hair, add 8 more minutes. Shbaths are a little cold. The funny part is that the bathroom workers finished their work on the bathroom today, but we're still shbathing. Apparently they were only working on the tiles.

The word I'm looking for is I think 'unheimlich.' The most interesting part about being in Germany is that I keep expecting it to stop being Germany. There's a language which I understanding perfectly well, and then there's this other one, which is like mashed up bits of words, and I keep being surprised that every time I get onto the subway in the morning, people are still talking the mashed-up language instead of the one that makes sense. The doors are still push to go in and pull to go out. There are still no water fountains; I drink out of the sinks. I shbathe.