As a newcomer to Germany, I wouldn’t be able to make it around the street corner without my GPS. It’s truly a marvelous piece of modern technology. There’s only one problem…I don’t speak German. And now I’m realizing that I don’t speak English, either.

I mean English English – the kind Brits speak. The nice lady on my GPS tries very hard to pronounce German words with her British accent…and she fails miserably. This isn’t actually much of a problem since the Germans use microscopic print for their street name signs and I can’t read them anyway.

GPS Lady also gives the distance to the next turn in meters or kilometers, which is about as easy for me to visualize as the distance from here to Mars. On top of that, she occasionally uses British terms that are not part of my vocabulary. Every time I make a wrong turn, I expect her to say, “Oh, bugger and bullocks, now I have to do another bloody recalculation.”

So if you hear a story about a woman driving her car into a German beer garden, it’s probably just me trying to understand my GPS. By the way, can someone please tell me what a slip road is?