In German, the Universe is Made of Cheese

Fact: Protons and neutrons are composed of quarks.

Fact: This is quark.

Last night, we had quark for dinner. After running to the grocery store to fetch it, I discovered that it's a cheese lying somewhere on the scale between cream and cottage.

But at first, there was a bit of confusion.

"Cynthia, we don't have any quark, and we need it for dinner tonight. Could you go get some?"
"...Quark? We're eating quarks?"
"Yes. It's in the yogurt section."

And that was the only clue I was given to quark's identity.

Unfortunately, in Austria quark is called "topfen." Naturally.

At the grocery store:
"Hallo, where are the quarks?"
"Uh. I don't know. What is quark?"
"Quark. I think it's yogurt."
"No, yogurt is yogurt. I don't think you're saying it right."

And so it continued, drawing the attention of a couple more clerks and a customer. I was considering bringing home anything and arguing that it's basically (several googals of) quark.

Fortunately, I was overheard by a German, who started laughing. Even though Germany and Austria are *this* far apart, they're as bad as the U.S. and Britain in mutual intelligibility of random vocabulary words (know what a courgette is? Hmm?). The kind German showed me the quark, labeled topfen, and I brought it back home in triumph. With it, we made some pancakes, and topped them with apfelmuß.

What I choose to take from this is that anything and everything around you could potentially be turned into an Austrian pancake.