Muppets take Deutschland

So, mein Freund comes from a small town on the Dutch border called Meppen (sounds like a Muppet character, no?) and this weekend we took advantage of Pfingswochenende or Pentecost -- the beginning of this word (the P-F part) is pronounced with a subtle ppppfffff sound, but I prefer to "Puh-Fuh" it, which I find highly amusing, though I can't say the German people are quite as tickled. Anyway, our train was delayed on the way there (I swear, the trains running on time thing, is just a rumor), but the cool thing was that when we missed our connection Deutsche Bahn (the German train people) paid for an hour-long taxi ride. If you've ever dealt with the humans (?) at Amtrak (let alone when you are wearing an arm cast bigger than your entire body and you are only wearing a tanktop in January in New York b/c you cannot get any substantial clothes over the ginormous cast and some moron got off in Philadelphia with your suitcase leaving you with a little more than a large bottle of cheap cologne), you know that this would never, ever come to pass. But this is supposed to be about the Fatherland, so.... Meppen is a very cute little town including a bar-club called New Jersey (because it's our coolest state and they know it), too many pizza places, pretty churches, etc. There are three rivers that flow about and lots of greenery and farmland. We went kayaking one day, which mostly involved mein Freund rowing and me getting uber excited and moo-ing/bah-ing loudly every 100 feet when we passed yet another cluster of calves/sheep (for whatever reason, only the sheep responded???). All in all, as I have been repeately told, Meppen is clearly the perfect place to be a small German boy. Anyway, it was a nice weekend with perhaps a bit too much of someone else's family and too many prepared mayonaisey or oily cream sauces, but I won't get into that or I'll get in trouble.

Unrelated: My computer is out to get me yet again -- I carried this machine across an ocean. It's a Mac for god's sake. It should know that it's an American computer. Why does it all the sudden think I speak German? Do I look/sound like I want to be immediately connected to Google Deutschland when I type in google.com (Sam, I need you to look into this STAT....oops, no pun intended (she's a statistician!) or Amazon.de? Just because I type in the ocassional German word or quasi-read the ocassional German newspaper article does not mean that I want to conduct all business auf Deutsch.