Think global, act (like a) local

As I write this, I am on a Norwegian air flight from Berlin to London, nicely emblematic of the open-borders (possibly vanishing, who knows!) European Union. It seems like a good time to wrassle out some thoughts and encounters I’ve had in the past weeks related to language, fitting in, cultural fluency and exploration. All this, and nothing more, after the jump!

Chandelier at Brauerie Spezial, my B&B/Biergarten home in Bamberg and the site of my lengthiest, most in-depth conversation entirely in German! Which was not the best conversation I had in Germany! I guess this is FORESHADOWING for the post below? Is that a thing? I'm not sure how captions work.

Swinging from Italy into Munich was something of a relief. Not only does Munich feel, oddly, intuitively familiar and coherent in a way that much of Italy did not, but I was back in a country where I had reasonable fluency in the local language. This hadn’t really been an issue early on in the trip – I spoke German in Austria and either German or English in Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic.

English was particularly common outside of Austria – as the manager of an excellent wine bar in Budapest put it, “We all have to speak something other than Hungarian, because who’s going to learn Hungarian?” I had a tour guide who told a similar story – he actually remembered the year that, following the fall of the iron curtain, all of his Russian teachers were suddenly English teachers.

In Italy, the language barrier was higher – fewer locals were conversant in English, and my Italian was pretty well limited. The compensating factor was physical animation. Generalizations, again, but Italians bring a robust physicality to conversation, so even when reaching a linguistic impasse, it was usually an easy hop over to miming our way through a conversation.

So, being in Germany was a bit of a relief, though also a bit stressful – because my dissertation is on a German-language topic, there was always a meter pinging in the back of my head, a flashing light next to a panel reading “If you don’t get through these conversations entirely in German you will never successfully acquire a PhD.” It was imposter syndrome, but for chatting with neighbors at a restaurant. SUPER FUN!

What it ultimately fed into, though, was this odd tic I have found that I have, which is the desire to completely blend. It’s the same instinct that, back home, sees me immediately scope out ordering systems at restaurants, traffic flow in train stations, etc. In these travels, it’s manifested itself in an attempt to “stick the landing,” to run encounters start-to-finish in the local language, almost to go unnoticed as a non-native speaker.

Which is hilariously stupid, turns out, because of coursethe best and most interesting conversations I’ve had here have been the ones where I admit to some blend of ignorance and curiosity, where my linguistic skill level (however rudimentary) is more about respecting the culture and gesturing an investment in it, and less about some weird act of touristic espionage.

So, when I’m at a bar in Berlin and I tell the bartender that it never occurred to me that Austrian rum would be a thing (and of course, why wouldn’t it?) it ends up unlocking a conversation with him as well as the four other patrons at the bar, two of whom go on to spend most of the night chatting with me about their own travels, what they like about the cities they like, swapping advice for my Scandinavian travels coming up, and their take on Brexit and the future of the EU.

Or a night earlier, at a burger joint, when it became apparent that my German was a little too limited for the awkwardly polite chit-chat I was sharing with the two guys at my table (both working in Berlin at a pharma company), the switch to English opened up a conversation about the relative levels of bureaucratic red tape in Germany as opposed to France as opposed to the States, more travel story-swapping, and conversations about the depressingly-universal topic of gentrification (increasingly aided and abetted by AirBnB, against whom there is an incisively vulgar PR campaign afoot in Berlin).

Or a conversation with my roommate Laelia in Munich, who literally started the conversation by saying “English or German?” and leapt immediately to a fantastic and lengthy set of conversations. We bonded over a shared love of cities that incorporate green space well; chatted about her travels in the States and mine abroad. This was one of the most political conversations I’ve had over here, though not in the immediate “you’re not electing Trump, are you?” sense that you’d expect. Rather, her bewilderment at the States’s two-party system led to us mulling over the cultural differences between Germany and the US – that the US is a rooting country (with politics as sport) where, soccer excepted, Germany is not. (“The fact that you guys are devoted to a college sports team because you were born somewhere is crazy to me!”) More specific to our current degraded politics, she noted that at least for her it seems that Germans are very pointedly averse to charismatic politicians, and the kind of media-saturated celebrity-worship that has elevated Trump is anathema for obvious reasons “because of our history.”

I guess the linking thread in all these conversations has been the moment of one of us (often me, and I hope to get better at doing this!) saying “I don’t know!” And as much as my instinct is to Do Well and Just Seem Like A Local, the obvious-in-hindsight reality is that so many doors open when you reveal yourself to be a well-intentioned explorer, happy to admit your limited knowledge and eager to learn more. This, I hope, is something I’ll carry back with me into my life back home when I return, hopefully by thoroughly integrating the phrase “I don’t know, I guess I must be too stupid, forgive me ughhhh” into my daily lexicon?

OKAY! A National Express coach calls my name, and I’m off to Bristol! Berlin posts a-comin’ in the day or two to come. SPOILER ALERT: Good gravy I loved that city.