I’m going back through my travel diary of my 2007 holiday to Germany, enlarging and adding photos, adding hyperlinks, and generally cleaning it up a bit.
I found a bit where we went into a chocolate shop and my wife wanted to get just a bar of chocolate. But we could only see fancy truffles and pralines and chocolates with various nuts and other fillings. The woman in the shop didn’t speak any English, so I checked my phrasebook for a word meaning “plain”, so I could ask if she had any plain chocolate. The book gave me ebene, so I asked, “Haben Sie ebene Schokolade?”
She gave me a very strange look, and had no idea what I was talking about. Despite further attempts, I had no success in explaining to her what we wanted, and we ended up buying some chocolate with nuts in.
It’s only now, nine years later, that I’ve looked up “ebene“. It turns out I wasn’t asking for “ordinary, unadorned” chocolate. I was asking for “large region of flat land” chocolate!