They Don't Call it Wetter Here for Nothing

Having brought up a few similarities between Berlin and San Francisco recently, I must now admit that when it comes to the weather, these two cities don't have very much in common at all. It's not that the weather is bad here in Berlin, or even awful. Those would be the nice words for it. It's much more on the freakin' terrible side. And the Berliners are the first to admit it. That's one of the main reasons that they're always flying off to vacation on the Canary Islands, I assume.

It rains a lot here, for instance. It rains a whole lot here. Sure, it may be snowing at the moment, I admit, but otherwise it rains more, rain being very, very common here. In fact, it rains on average twenty to thirty feet per year here in Berlin, I would say. That's if you count the snow that's snowing at the moment as rain of course, but still.

A friend of mine came to visit me recently. He wanted to "do" Europe, as he said, and would be needing a place to stay while visiting Berlin and I was available, as he said (people who "do" Europe aren't known for being particularly shy). Unfortunately, like most people who aren't from here, he couldn't speak a word of German. Not one. He's a lot like another American friend of mine who lives in Berlin and can't speak any German either, only at least this guy tries to on occasion and can even makes sounds that sound like German from time to time. My visiting friend didn't even try to do that but, then again, why should he have? He would only be visiting for a week or two, or so I hoped. His English isn't all that good either, by the way. But that's another story.

At any rate, he's the friend who came in out of the rain, literally. It was raining the day he arrived and it continued raining right up until the day he climbed aboard the train to Munich about ten days later (this was in the summer, too, by the way). And, being an American, he was always watching TV here, or trying to. He wouldn't let me shut the damned thing off, either. And this despite the fact that the only programs he could follow were the ones on CNN and BBC. Talk about being desperate.

One night we decided to watch the national evening news show here, however, they call it Die Tagesschau. He began pacing around the living room a bit impatiently, still a bit damp from our excursion that afternoon, breathing down my neck, asking for a translation every thirty seconds or so. And at the end of the news it was time for the weather report. Weather is called Wetter here, by the way.

And that's when my buddy caught on that it was the weather report, all by himself. He saw the word Wetter and had an epiphany, of sorts. And the rest was history, as they say."What?" he said. "How could it possibly get any wetter than it is here already?"

Needless to say, there will be much more to follow. Please tune in next week for the coming episode.

-----

Originally from California's Central San Joaquin Valley and washed ashore on the coast of old West Berlin, Charles Larson is a freelance writer well versed in German and German culture. For more info, feel free to visit his website at EnglishPro & Co.