Deutsch Difficulties

These are just a couple of little stories that will amuse me to remember one day. So I'm sharing them here and perhaps they'll amuse you too.

So, yesterday Autumn and I stopped at the grocery store near her Kindergarten. We do this most days to fill the span of time between picking her up at 3:00 or so and not needing to get her brothers till 3:50. Plus, she refuses most food at the KiTa so we usually pick her up a Brötchen (bread roll) of some sort and she'll push around a tiny kid-sized cart that we fill with whatever groceries for the day.

Anyway, in the first little kid-sized cart, we found a bike helmet. With my limited language I was trying to decide what to do. Autumn said, "Maybe we should just put it in another cart" but I decided I would turn it into the employees. So, off I go...

Me: "Hallo. Haben Sie eine Fundbüro?" (Hello. Do [formal] you have a 'lost property office'? A word I know only because of my lost wallet escapade last September.)

Clerk: *confused face*

Me: "Fundbüro? Um, lost property office? Lost and found?"

Clerk: *still confused*

Me: *points at helmet in cart* "Das ist hier. Es ist nicht mein." (That is here. It is not my.)

Autumn: "Oder mein!" (Or my!)

Clerk: *brow furrows further*

Helpful Eavesdropper: "You have found this?" To clerk: "Deutschie deutsch deutsch."

Clerk: "Ahhhhh!" *takes helmet*

Me: *exit stage right, sheepishly* "Autumn, you should have helped me!" :)

Autumn: "I didn't want to feel embarrassed."

Me: "How do you think I looked?!?"

I was saying that to Autumn all in fun, of course, since it doesn't necessarily indicate that in the script. ;)

And the other thing still giving me a chuckle now and again:

We had our upstairs neighbors over recently for "Coffee and Cake". They speak really good English and are super nice about helping us with our Deutsch. As we were talking about their almost one year old about to start at a Kindergarten and the mom returning to work I asked her, "Was ist Ihre Arbeit?" (what is your work?) and she said, in English, "You can say 'do'" so I went, "Okay, what do you do?"

It wasn't until after they left that it occurred to me that she was saying "You can say 'du'" as in informal you! Ha! I had said "Ihre" as a formal "Your" and she was letting me know, "Oh, 'du' is fine, we're neighbors and plus I'm younger than you are so we can be 'familiar' and use "Du/Deine" versus "Sie/Ihre"". Ha ha ha. I'm a dork.