why i hate germany...

i can't turn the heat on in my house. i suppose that the local gas company has to come to my house b/c nothing here is ever simple. i went to the landlord house today and stumbled through asking for his help in turning the heat on and he said something about the telephone which i loosely translated either to " call the gas company" or "call someone who speaks english". we have conversations everyday which consist of me translating in my head what he is saying to my broken german. i know maybe 6 words of german and he knows no english. i generally use lots of gestures and he usually loses interest when we have lulls of silence and he excuses himself. last week i asked him if we used to have horses in our barn. i do not know the german word for horse and it is surprisingly not in my quick phrase book. so i repeated slowly in english and made horse sounds. i then used my hands to shape an imaginary horse in the air. needless to say, he finished his cigarette and said "ciao". so there you have it. my life. my kid has a cold. i am developing a sore throat and my wife is pissed. i did find some sort of furnace which lit and got hot but only got hot at the source. if i was a hobbit and lived in the basement that would be great. however i hate the basement b/c i decided as most city kids would that storing the extra dog food there is logical. the bag is now empty and all that remains is a mass quanity of shiite. i informed the wife of this occurrence and said we most have a bunny. she was not impressed. she said that she knew it was a rat and the cuddly mouse that i attempted to sell her on after the bunny charade. not to mention that the fact that the basement probably is haunted. i am not your typical scary pants but the neighbor's friend was a pow at some internment camp in louisiana and the landlord also fought the u.s. in munich (munchen)...
side note: why does the u.s. find it necessary to rename everything. if a country calls something one name why must we rename it. just adding to my difficulty in finding on a map. thank you america for your divine right theology fuckers. digressing...the ss is surrounding me and anti-americanism is at an all time high so much so that i circled the block 3 times last night walking the dog b/c i was just positive that the man parking outside my house was planting a bomb. i live in the smallest farming community around and i am convinced (thanks mr. president) that he is targeting my random ass house for an explosive device. this jihad is a bitch.
back to the ghosts. i am quite sure that the jews were kept in my house. everyone around here says that the shackles located in my basement were horses or some other animal but to me i see anne frank everytime i go down looking for some box of crap that i should've left in japan anyway. but nooooooo i brought my crap to germany so that anne frank's ghost could have even less room to play in. fucking great.
the neighbor was not impressed btw when i kinda let out a nervous laugh when he told me that his perfect english was garnered from some dude keeping watch over him in the bayou. fucking great.
so in short i love being overseas "fightin' for freedom" but fuck me can i just get a heater, a fucking closet (no sorry the germans take them with each time they move), a decent size freezer, and a phone line( oh the last tenants cut the line before left, of course they did...who wouldn't have).