October 8 - Hide the Sausage

When Ingrid and Greta asked me if I wanted to play hide the sausage, I really felt like my experience as an exchange student was about to take a turn for the hell yeah. Check two or three fantasies off my bucket list (Sisters? Europeans? (Nazis?)) and have the cultural exchange story to trump all others? I would love to.
Unfortunately, it turns out hide the sausage is really the name of a game they play in Germany. It's pretty straightforward: One person hides a sausage; everyone else tries to find it. And it's actually kind of fun once you get over the disappointment of realizing that your two impossibly stacked German host sisters aren't asking you if you want to do it with them.
It, however, was a completely different story with my host father Jacob when he came home one night stinking of schnapps and inviting me into his basement rec room for 'un round of hide der sausage.'
Sure, I told him. But it won't be fun if it's just you and me. Let me go see if Ingrid and Greta want to play, too.
Well, the conversation got really awkward at that point. He got all flustered and all of a sudden I couldn't understand his German and he couldn't my English and eventually he was just like never mind, and then the next morning it was like he'd forgotten about it.
Or not. Because then a bunch of times over the next few months he made a really obvious point of getting everyone together to play hide the sausage and went on and on about how it's a great game for the whole family and all that, and it's like, whatever. So you wanted to get with the young American exchange student. You ain't the first.
Well, actually he was the first, but still.
Anyway, the rest of my time there was a nonstop loop of forced male bonding every time I ran into Jacob in the hallway (Vat did you think of last night's Bayern Munich match?) and finding a hidden sexual component to everything that came out of Ingrid and Greta's mouths (You vant to put the icing on our cherry strudel?).
Yeah, that year abroad was definitely filled with lots of botched communications and misunderstandings. And I feel like their tendency to be unclear kind of rubbed off on me.
Which brings me to my point, Madame Secretary, which is that when I asked you if you wanted to play hide the sausage last night, I was referring to the old German game.