First-Time Foreigner

Submitted by Alison McGee on November 3, 2010 - 6:56pm

 

Embarking on my inaugural international adventure, I hopped the pond this past weekend for an exhilarating, albeit brief, visit to Germany. We left the serene Berkshires for bustling Boston mid-week and flew into Hannover, Germany, where I was greeted with the bustle of the city, which I am familiar with, but in the indecipherable (fast-paced) German tongue.
 
That “urban white noise” of overlapping conversations took on a different tune as the words floated out in a language of which I knew about half a sentence. My confidence in navigation was shaken by the realization that I couldn’t pronounce the lengthy street names, let alone finish reading them by the time we’d whizzed past signs. Names like Raschplatzhochstrasse and Vahrenwalder Strasse were dissected by multi-hyphens on maps as equally letter-laden names intersected them in a tangle of winding foreign words.
 
Thankfully by the end of my five-day stay I’d thoroughly familiarized myself with the maps and some of the street names, and enjoyed pronouncing the names with a sing-songy emphasis on the “strahs-suh” (strasse, German for street).
 
After spending most of the first afternoon in Hannover, we hopped on the Autobahn and made our way to Berlin, where a dazzling array of lights greeted us that first evening, just before we collapsed after our approximate seven-plus hours of travel and barely two hours of restless sleep.
 
The next morning we set out on another full day of sightseeing, mostly on foot, some on the public transportation systems known as the U-Bahn and the S-Bahn, which, though confusing at first, turned out to be crucial to us throughout the long weekend for covering the distance we did.
       
What Berlin (and Hannover) did most for me was humor my longtime love of architecture—both cities were brimming with breathtaking buildings both old and new (and some, such as the Reichstag in Berlin) a combination of the two. 
 
But the affect of being unable to understand the majority of what was said to or around me led me through the city in a way I’d never experienced before; it was humbling, intriguing, and refreshing all at once. As I started to piece together the language it became exciting to learn new words and find connections to things I already knew. It was I who had the accent now and sounded funny as I stumbled through Danke, Spreichen Sie English?!, and frequently responded with “Thanks” or “Hi” instead of Guten Tag or Hallo.
 
But I loved it. It’s rare to get to experience something so new and unfamiliar that you feel utterly lost, yet intent on learning more. When greeted with a Boston-accented “Hello” at US Customs upon my return, it felt almost like waking up from a dream and I realized I was almost disappointed to be able to understand the conversations around me.
 
I look forward to the next adventure.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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