She won't go and blame anyone for the virus. She won't really say anything harsh or bad against Chancellor Merkel. She won't really dwell on the numbers that appear nightly (ICU bunks/bed, death rate, new infection rate, etc).
The criticism will mostly deal with ban rules, routine things which can't be routine any longer (like getting a simple hair appointment), doctor doom advice or trying to assimilate a regular birthday or Christmas pattern.
There is a particular type of Christmas cookie (Germans are particular about quality of such cookies) that she would typically buy at the local Wiesbaden Christmas market. Well....this year with the ban rules....there is no market area, so no cookies.
Expressing a great deal of frustration on her part, I took this as a research project, to find the 'dealer' (like some cocaine dealer or LSD dealer) who dealt in this quality cookie manufacture.
So I found the folks....which means a quiet visit to someone's garage in Wiesbaden and they are 'dealing' cookies out of the garage (don't ask, it does feel like some drug dealer situation, if you ask me).
The chief German word used in her conversation or chatter over the past year? Unglaublich.
Defining unglaublich? Annoyed, peeved, unbelievable, incredible, striking, and unimaginable.
Use by the wife? I would take a guess that the word has been used at least 10,000 times since late February. If you did the math....it's an expression used at least 30 times a day.
She'll utter it in the super-market, a parking lot, while watching nightly news, or while gossiping with relatives or friends.
She has even developed three 'tones' for the use of unglaublich.
There's the deep emphasized three syllables pronunciation of the word....which means she's fairly angry and heading toward a stressed-out moment. This is the situation where I'm trying to get her to leave the store before she explodes and lays into a cussing situation (a recent grocery trip resulted in this hasty exit when dealing with the butcher shop 'ladies').
There is the mild two syllable attempt on pronunciation, which is usually reserved when some store has a entry-limit idiot holding you back from entering.
Then there is the three word attempt (un-glaub-lich, where it sounds like three totally separate words) where some ban rule has made shopping or regular life just about impossible (like when the toilet paper ran out in local grocery shops).
Across Germany...there's probably five to ten million people who have used up all of their patience, and are just a single moment away from exploding on some store manager, some nurse, some postal guy, or some government official.
It is a remarkable thing to view....patience running on fumes, and no real way to restore the balance of patience.
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