Are You Dumber than an American?

[xocet]

217. You must have a very interesting existence - I won't ask what you do....

I remember taking the train from Brussels to Aachen and on to Köln. That cathedral is extraordinarily impressive, and there are some nice art museums nearby. I went back to Belgium and Germany the next year, went to Scandinavia (Denmark, Sweden and Finland) too, returned to the USA after the summer and then made the unfortunate mistake of having the local K-mart develop my photos - the negatives of the Belgian waffles etc. were never seen again.

Since you mention Romania, I have to ask if you have ever had a chance to speak with anyone there who speaks the Sächsisch dialect, and, if so, what your impression of it is. Back in the 1980's, I met a woman in Würzburg who was originally from Romania. Normally, she and I would speak German in conversation. One day she called home: parts of her conversation were intelligible, so later I asked her what she had been speaking. She told me that it was Sächsisch. I did not get the chance to hear much more of the dialect, since I moved to Stuttgart shortly after that, but it was interesting to find out how widespread German dialects are.