Nobody answered with the first two numbers, but a nice lady answered on the third. He told her the days that we would like to stay there (Monday, Tuesday, and Friday night since we were going to Prague in between) and she took my name down. The only problem was that Russ didn't find out the address of the place nor did he find out the price. I guess it's not natural to ask about those things, unless you want to know where you're going to go and how much it's going to cost you. With the help of a German speaker from work who called once for me, I found out the address and the price. It was on the street next to the temple, maybe a five minute walk away. It turns out that we were staying in the upstairs of her home.
Sarah posing in front of our beautiful Freiberg home.
If you can call a place "home" for three nights.
If that isn't enough, here was the room we stayed in.
(The pillows were about an inch thick once you put your head on them.)
Turns out, the lady didn't speak much English at all. She kind of asked us where we were from by saying "Utah?" to which we answered "yes." (She must have had other returned missionaries stay there, because she's not a member and how else would anyone in Germany have their first guess be "Utah" for where someone is from?)
There's nothing quite like trying to communicate something to someone else when both of you want to understand but it just isn't going anywhere. Two of our "lost in translation" adventures were the following:
When we first arrived, we tried to tell here that we needed to go back to Prague (we didn't bother trying to tell her the name of the small city) to pick up the rest of our group since a car had broken down. We try saying "We are going to Prague and back tonight." She responds, "you come back tomorrow?" We say "No, we're going there and back tonight to pick up our friends. Car broke down." (Try using your body language to express "car broke down" - harder than you'd think.) She responds with "You stay here Monday, Tuesday, Friday, yes?" We say "Yes, that's right. We're going to Prague Wednesday and Thursday. (At this point, I'm ready to give up on failed communication, and I just finished with a quick response) We're coming back late tonight." She says "okay," but her body language conveys "I don't understand." We're okay with that, because we've got to get back to the group.
Second story: When we got back from Prague Friday night, we bought some yogurt (our favorite breakfast food while in Europe) for breakfast Saturday morning on our way back from the train station. On Monday and Tuesday night, we had stayed in a room that had a refrigerator, but the room we got Friday night didn't have one. I went to go ask her if we could put them in her refrigerator, to which she responded "yes." She came back up with two spoons - I had to hold back the laughter as I said "No, breakfast." She understood then and we enjoyed a wonderful yogurt breakfast on Saturday.
Not really what we expected for our referral from the temple housing, but it definitely added to the adventures of our honeymoon. Thank you, Mrs. Klausnitze.
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