The Discovery of...Bologna?!

The discovery of…Bologna?

There are a few things that most people take for granted until living in a foreign country.  One of them is going to the bank.  I have learned over the past few months that the word “einzahlen” means to deposit money.  This is very useful if you don’t know how to say things like “I want to put this in my account”.  I still don’t know what the word for bank account is in German, but when I say I want to deposit money and give them my card, they get the idea.  To withdraw, I find it easiest to use the atm (geldautomat-literally money machine).  
Another challenge for the language impaired is grocery shopping.  Now most days at home I forget what it was I went to the grocery store to get.  That is no problem here (I make lists)…here, the problem is that I know what I want and even where it should be, but I have no idea what it’s called.  Milk was my first challenge.  There is in one tiny grocery store, a huge wall of dairy products that I couldn’t identify.  “Milch” is an easy enough word to translate, but what does “fettarme” mean?  I know now that it means low fat.  Ok, that only took me a week to get used to.  So a wall of milk, some low fat, some not, no explaination of what animal it comes from, and oh yes, why is it not refrigerated? Uh…ok, we’ll just go with that one ‘cause the milk is good for the next three months.
Ok, now that we’ve got milk, we move on to meats.  This should be fairly easy.  You can identify most meat.  Well, that is until you are really broke and can only afford lunch meat for sandwiches for the next week.  So on one of my really broke days I was shopping for lunch meat.  I chose the cheapest ones.  One was salami looking and the other was some pinky looking stuff.  “Ham sausage” according to the package.  Turns out, ham sausage is actually bologna.  (Huh…so that’s what’s in bologna.)  Really I should have figured on it being bologna, since it was the cheapest meat in the place.  A little side note, I haven’t particularly cared for bologna (except the pickled kind) since I was about twelve, but I’ve learned to like it again. Meat also comes in a jar.  Having read “The Jungle” recently, I keep my distance from jar meats.  It really does look like cat food in a mustard jar.  Thanks, sometimes my cats won’t even eat that crap.  
An easy buy?  Pizza.  You can always look at the box to know what’s on it.  This was a staple food here for a long time, but I’ve given it up for lent.  Since deciding to give up pizza for lent, I’ve received at least 5 pizza take-out menus in my mail box every week.  They’re torturing me.  Really they are.  One more week…one more week…