When I think back to my first two years here in Germany, I realize that there were just as many funny moments as frustrating. I arrived here with a six-month-old baby in the middle of winter, with no knowledge of German (well, the bad words don’t really count). For the first month, we lived with my mother and father-in-law in a small dorf outside of Kaltenkirchen. It’s hard to adjust to a new culture, country, and language when you have the feeling you are more guest than anything else, so that single month was spent learning German basics and trying to be a model daughter-in-law. I mostly learned what German housewives did during that first month, as that was what I was to become in the upcoming years.
The next few months were spent commuting back and forth to Hamburg and Kaltenkirchen to language school. I learned a lot about the difference between village life and big city life on those trips. Every train ride was a new experience (remind me to tell you about the drunk guy on the 7:20 train composing his own theme music) and I soaked it all in. In the afternoons, after school, I watched Sesamstraße (German Sesame Street) to get new vocabulary and to train my ears to hearing a simpler form of German, a tip a friend of mine gave me when she moved from China to the States in the late 80s(although, to be honest, she still has a fear of birds thanks to Big Bird).
I have so many awkward, funny moments and language faux pas stuck in my head that choosing one is a feat. For instance, to this day, I refuse to talk about weather in German when it’s warmer and muggy because I always, always mix up the words schwül (humid) and schwul (homosexual). My mother-in-law still gets a tickle out of this; though I’ve now been here seven years and, at this point, the joke should be getting old. The one that does stick out the most in my memory is my first visit to my Frauenarzt here. My German had been bare basics and at this point, we had been here six months at most. She asked me about something and all I really caught was the word verkehr (She had said geschlechtsverkehr, or, intercourse). “Wow,” I had thought, “weird time to ask about traffic, but, whatever.” So, considering it had taken me a while to get there because of traffic, I responded, “So much traffic! In fact, I can barely move at all! And all those people!” I looked up to see the most horrified look on her face until it dawned on her what I was talking about. When she explained what she had meant, it was my turn to be horrified because, for a moment there, my Ob-gyn had obviously thought I was a swinger.
I could have given up after each embarrassing encounter, but if I had, I most certainly would not be the person I am today. From each of these moments I learned how to laugh at myself, learned how to relax, and gained a bit of self-confidence each time I caught myself in time to prevent another disastrous conversation. I’m not completely fluent, but I am now just as comfortable with my German self as I am with my American self and I think that’s what matters most.
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