Bad Service and Dumm surnames

No, I’m not about to berate the German service and I know how to spell dumb 😉
It struck me, yesterday, that I have become accustomed to seeing signs and advertising for bathrooms (Bathroom = Bad auf Deutsch) without the chuckle it used to instigate. Can it be that I’m thinking more in German than in English or have I, perhaps, grown up?! If anything, the former may be true…
When I’m a passenger on a car journey and especially on motorways, I like to play ‘spot silly license plates’ . Just yesterday, I pointed one out that read mühl87 (Mill87) and was gleeful to make the joke that that’s my nickname in German rather than confuse it with Müll (rubbish).

It’s now five months since I moved out here, and with a couple of language courses under my belt (the latest being level B1, for those that know the system) I finally feel that I’ve embraced the sound world and culture that surrounds me and that I’m not always hiding behind ‘I only speak a little bit of German’.
The sentence structure is definitely registering – so much so, that my English sentences are sometimes in the German sentence structure – that’s right, folks, my English has deteriorated!
We have found another couple around our age in the village, and went with a group to Rosenheim’s Oktoberfest, called Herbsfest, last weekend. Our social lives have suddenly taken off! While I was doing the intensive course, with the daily commute into Munich and the huge amounts of homework or extra work to do to catch up, we didn’t do much socialising. At the Herbsfest, then, it was clear improvement had occurred – the little man that used to squeal in my head while someone spoke to me in German, seems to have moved on!
I’ll be over in London for the next few weeks, but I plan to watch any Netflix in German and to continue working through my grammar books. I can honestly say that I expect to miss hearing the German language, though.