Our apartment here in Hannover, Germany, has a little south-facing balcony in back. It gets full sun with almost no wind, thanks to the adjoining buildings on either side. During the summer months, our balcony gets so hot we are forced to enjoy Saturday morning brunch in our underpants. Seriously, we eat sliced meats, cheeses and bread rolls wearing little more than the shame God gave us.
I don’t know if it’s the heat, lack of wind, or the musk of our traditional German breakfasts, but we are constantly hassled by wasps. They only come one at a time — never in a swarm — but they are relentless. Destroying these wasps is a task which falls squarely upon my American shoulders; I use my baseball cap to swat them right out of the sky, and then separate their heads from their bodies with the brim of my hat, like a big, dull knife. Once a wasp has been decapitated, I set its head upon the ledge of the balcony — eventually gathering 4 or 5 of them and lining them up in a row — as a warning to the rest of the wasp community: “Your kind is not welcome here. All stinging insects will be assassinated without hesitation. (Except honey bees. You guys are cool.)”
During my time as a naturally gifted wasp slayer, (dare I say, artist?), I have learned exactly 2 things:
- Wasps give exactly zero fucks about the sight of their decapitated family members.
- My wife hates wasps more than I do
So back in September, as we were eating brunch on our balcony, one particularly ballsy fellow landed on a piece of meat on my wife’s plate. I gently brushed the wasp upward, into the air, and smacked it right back down with my baseball cap. It hit the ground, stunned but very much alive, and buzzed its little wings with such fury the dust swirled around it like a pissed-off tornado. That’s when my wife announced:
THE WIFE: “Okay. She can die now.”
ME: *Laughing* “She? Why is it a ‘she‘ and not an ‘it‘? Can you see her little wasp titties or something?”
THE WIFE: “Just kill her!“*
*Apparently, the German noun for “wasp,” (die Wespe), is neither masculine nor neutral; it is feminine. Click here to learn more about the German language in our blog post: An Initial Impression of the German Language: Gender-Based Nouns Are Just Awful.
Oh God, My Wife Is German. 
I sometimes think that wasps are Japanese kamikazes as the more you kill the more you get on your head and it never stops until autumn and chill weather comes. And the worst ones are those who go for your beer – while I hate sharing food with them and I need to get into this ‘kill ’em all’ frenzy each time when they land on my food, it’s almost mission impossible to get one out of your beverage unless you wait for one to drown ;)
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Haw haw! And then you try to swat it with your hat, only to wind up knocking over every beer around you…
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haha.. that’s exactly what I meant when I said my boyfriend always comments on me having a male car, computer, etc. We Germans just like to have everything precise and in order.. so we need to know if it is male or female… no matter what it is. Plus, it makes it easier to choose names.. we all do that sometimes, don’t we?
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Haw! I don’t know. It’s just so much easier to call everything “it” or “that” while learning a new language. I love trying to guess at genders though. “Hey honey, is that a male airplane?” “No, it’s neutral.” “Dammit!”
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