"Haben Sie Ihre Karte?"

My brother and I are 150 kilometers north of Würzburg in the checkout line at “Ratio,” a German bulk grocery supplier much like Costco, and the smiling, middle-aged cashier is asking me for my card. I’m going to pay her with a crisp 100 Euro bill (that’s the one the size of a twin bed sheet, unlike the 50 which is merely the size of a sheet of printer paper), so I politely tell her “Nein” and go back to carefully unfolding the massive bill out of my wallet. “Excuse me, sir, your Ratio card please,” her voice now slightly firmer. Ah, I get it: she wants my savings card so that I can get 1% back on the 79 cent tube of hot mustard at the front the conveyer belt. I express to her in my less-than-perfect German that, although we were drawn to the mega-store by the six flapping banners advertising jaw-dropping daily savings, we’ll forego the few extra cents partially in the name of time, but mostly because neither of us has a Ratio savings card. Thinking that my clarification would suffice, I tell Brant to pull the cart through the aisle to get ready to load up our meager, but carefully selected four days worth of food.

“Entshuldigung mein Herr, in order to shop here, you have to have a card that I can scan to show me that you’re a member. If you don’t have the card, I cannot allow you to purchase this food.” Her explanation is delivered clearly and flatly, almost as if she were an automated voice reciting the oft-repeated spiel. I gulp and look over at Brant for support, but with his eight word German vocabulary he’s blissfully unaware of our newly discovered problem. I’m sure it’s a common problem that with embarrassment comes an instantaneous drop in foreign language confidence, but every time it happens I’m so surprised and it has a way of snowballing on itself – the more embarrassed I get, the less I know how to say. Seeing nowhere else to turn and the line behind us slowly growing, I pocket my dignity and my €100 (which now feels like one of those flags they wav during the National Anthem at the Super Bowl) and barely manage to choke out the three word question to ask the cashier what we should do. Now looking equally as surprised as me, she replies “Eh, keine Ahnung. Das ist so schade, weil Sie so schön eingekauft haben,” which translates literally to “Eh, no idea. This is such a shame because you guys have shopped so beautifully.”

Excuse me while I go on a small aside here. ‘Beautifully’ initially seems like an odd/interesting word to describe our shopping endeavor, but you know what, damn right our work was beautiful! Imagine walking into Costco looking for four days food for two people with very little money – that would be difficult, right? While a German village party might find good use for a 23-kilogram block of cheese and a 20-liter bucket of curry ketchup, such bulk was a bit much for us. When cursory scans down each aisle revealed only items which could be moved using a fork-lift, we had to get clever. While we could find smaller packages of most foods tucked in dark corners, others could only be found in large boxes of 50 or 100 count. However, a quick rip of a large milk box revealed that the smaller liter boxes inside each had their own barcode, which meant they were available for individual retail sale. Or so we hoped. Either way, finding the right items in the right size was no small task, so she didn’t know how dead-on she was to classify our haul as having been “beautifully” gathered.

Back to the predicament at hand: the cashier and I are going back and forth on possible solutions. She asks me if perhaps I’d seen somebody in the store I know from whom I could borrow a Ratio card. “Um, not exactly.” I explain that we aren’t locals and don’t expect to casually bump into acquaintances in a German warehouse outside Frankfurt. Eventually we whittle down the options to two. First, Brant and I can go around the store replacing our bananas and bags of assorted rolls or second, we can just leave the store, pitifully abandoning our caché on the belt unused. Neither option sounds appealing to me, to her, or (as gathered through broken bits of translation) to Brant. At what appeared to be an impasse, our heroine comes to the rescue in the form of another middle-aged, German woman, but this one is a customer (or rather, registered member) instead of employee. She offers us her card and we take it without a moments hesitation. Who knows if she took pity on the two Californians confused by a German system which is in actuality anything but novel, or if perhaps she was thinking: “The faster these fools leave, the faster I can buy my industrial pale of sauerkraut and 64 pack of white bratwurst.” Whatever her motive, we don’t care. We thank her for her humanitarianism and pay for our loot. As we’re finally wheeling our cart to the door, smelling the fresh German air, a shrill “Herren! Herren!!” comes from the Register-of-Shame. What’s that, we forgot our Ratio-sized receipt? How could we?! Our friend the cashier hands us a laser jet printout of our purchase list, an all too fitting end to our experience as German bulk shoppers – a receipt big enough to fill the back of our rented Renault station wagon by itself.

Each day I am in Germany, I realize how humbling it is to wade into a new culture and a new language. There are daily lessons to be learned, new words to be memorized and all of that is to be done without the rest of the world slowing down to accommodate you. At first it’s a shock, but I am slowly catching the hang of it. The challenges teach me to listen, remind me to exercise manners, and force me to always read the fine print, for I never know when they will tell me not to enter a building without a membership card. We’re nearing the car when Brant realizes that we have no knife to cut our hard earned food. “Man,” Brant thinks out loud, “I bet Ratio would have a sweet deal on a kitchen knife.” On second thought, we can just use the car key to cut our tomatoes.