Partial restoration of my faith in males.

I have a quite simply beautiful story to tell you.

Let's set the scene. Tuesday afternoon at work, about an hour before I knock off. I've been on my own at the reception desk since 9am, and I'm slightly stressed from trying to simultaneously sort out the day-to-day client issues and tackle the weekly mountain of paperwork and administration.

The computer has frozen, the phone is ringing, there are clients standing at the reception desk demanding my immediate and utmost attention, and my boss has chosen to stand in the corridor and watching me handle this alone, rather than step in and make herself useful.

I don't recognise the man standing before me, which is unusual, since I know almost all of the clients at least by face, if not by name.

"Can I help you?"
He replies in German. "I hope so. I need a favour." He confirms that he's not a client, past, present or future, but that he needs me to do him a favour nonetheless. I'm curious. "What can I do for you?"

He explains that he is looking for a native speaker of English who can also speak German to translate a letter for him. Considering the crowd of clients starting to gather behind him, I politely suggest he check the trusty annals of Google for a professional translator.

No, he explains: this isn't a standard letter. His girlfriend is Australian, and she's been living in the UK, but the financial crisis has forced her to return home to Australia on short notice, with no possibility or plans to return to Europe, all but sealing the fate of their relationship.

He explains that she is booked on a flight home early the following morning, and since he is too upset to tell her how he feels about her himself, he has written a letter which he wants to give to her. He doesn't have the words in English to express his feelings, so he's written it in German. Problem is, his girlfriend doesn't speak German. That's where the favour comes in.

I really sympathise with this guy, and I really want to help him, but I've got a thousand and one things to do - clients to deal with, my boss still watching my every move, and the phone is still ringing. I answer the phone, and while arranging an appointment, a light goes off in my head, and I realise how I can help this guy out while staying out of trouble with my boss - clearly I'm not supposed to be hawking my services as a translator while working at a language school.

I write an email address on a scrap of paper. "I can't help you out, but a friend of mine might be able to. Her English is native, and her German's good. Email her." I wish him luck, and pick up the receiver to answer the phone, returning my focus to my work.

That night, I check my emails. It was an alternate email address of mine that I wrote on that scrap of paper - one that I use when I don't want my name advertised. Sure enough, he'd emailed me. He explained the story again, and begged for my help in translating the attached text.

Well, Shakespeare or Goethe this guy is not, but the emotion in his writing made it clear to me that he was very much in love with this woman, and that her departure was leaving him in a world of heartache and pain. I replied, revealing my identity as the receptionist he begged for help, and promised to translate his writing as best I could.

As tempting as it is, I will not post his work on this blog - I respect his privacy and his rights an an author, and hope that the good writer's karma I'm sending out may come back to me eventually. Suffice to say that if I received a letter like this one from someone I was dating, I would be 100% and completely theirs.

Guys, take note.

Lightbulb moments

Today was a brilliant day. Today, I had the rare opportunity of being reminded of exactly why I love to teach, and how much I miss teaching regularly.

It didn't start out that way. For the first five hours of my six hour shift, I was practically chained to the front desk - fielding calls, making appointments, answering questions, with brief sojourns into the kitchen to make coffee for clients.

At the start of the final hour, a colleague emerged from a meeting to relieve me - not a moment too soon. I had just got off the phone with a particularly challenging student, and in the ten minutes that she talked at me, six students had gathered at the reception counter demanding my immediate attention, a prospective client was asking for information on an English course, not to mention the incoming calls on the other line.

Five minutes of teamwork, and calm was restored. I seized the chance to escape from behind the desk, and headed into the back of the school to check the state of the main classroom. After refilling the pens and cleaning an explanation of possessive pronouns off the whiteboard, I ventured into the computer lab. Everything looked to be in order, and I was just about to leave when I heard my name being called.

I turned around, and saw the eager face of one of the newer students smiling at me over his computer."Hi, L. What's up?"

He was working on a grammar exercise practising the conditional mood, but despite having read the explanation and asking one of the other students for help, he still didn't understand. The memory of sitting in a university tutorial room in Clayton with two of my best friends trying to get our heads around the very same topic in German was still fresh enough in my mind that I could sympathise with his confusion, so I pulled a chair over, sat down next to him at his computer, and opened up the grammar book.

For the next fifteen minutes, we worked through the explanation and some of the activities. He seemed to be getting it, so when we got to the end of the page, I asked him to explain it back to me. To his amazement, he did it perfectly. When he finished, the look on his face is one that I will never forget. The golden moment of comprehension. The lightbulb moment. The "Aha!" moment. That expression was all the thanks I needed.

He looked at me, smiling, and said thank you. "No worries," I replied, and stood up, heading for the door. What happened next was the icing on the cake. The student he had previously asked for help had got up from her computer and was standing next to L; I heard her ask him in German to explain to her what I'd just explained to him, and you can imagine how proud I felt of him to hear him pass on the explanation.

That one fleeting moment made my day all that much better. The knowledge that I had been able to help a student understand something which previously had been a mystery to him, and seeing the realisation on his face when he discovered he had figured it out, was invaluable. It reminded me that regardless of the office politics, the problem students and the unrelenting chaos of the reception desk, the most rewarding thing about teaching for me is, and always will be, moments like that: having the opportunity to take the time to help a student understand that which was previously shrouded in mystery and confusion, and to use that feeling of achievement to encourage and motivate them to continue learning.

Those rare golden moments of realisation are the reason I teach. You can never see them coming, and you can go for days or even weeks without experiencing a moment like that, but when you do, for one blissful moment, it makes everything else seem trivial; somehow, it makes all the chaos, all the late nights and early mornings, and all your extra effort worthwhile.

Everyone wants their 15mins...

I think the population of Berlin is actually trying to make it into my blog. It seems that everywhere I go in the last week, people are actively entertaining me in order to feature in the superlative web publication that is Kangaroos in Deutschland.

Seriously, where do I start?

Maybe the coffee hawkers in the Ubahn? Two street kids in the Ubahn trying to sell me a 500g jar of Nestlé Gold for the bargain price of 4,- Euro (RRP 7.95). They even took the lid off and proudly displayed the in-tact golden foil seal. (Don’t worry – I didn’t buy it).

Or the "Äh, du Penner, du Opfer, ick ____ deine Mutter," Turkish kids, again in the Ubahn? (Non-German-speakers can use their imagination or Leo.org.) Seriously, some of the most interesting tales that this city has to tell happen in the subterranean maze of the train network.

This time, it was four Turkish teenagers having a full-on fight in the Ubahn… during which I unfortunately was occupying one of the two window seats in the group of seats they had chosen as the location of their very public difference of opinion. Great opportunities for studying Gastarbeiter Deutsch, and Neukölln slang… which the linguist in me would’ve wholeheartedly embraced and possibly noted down, had I not been trying to avoid all eye contact and not make any sudden moves.

No, I think the award for "Most Hardcore Berlin Experience of the Week" goes to my casual stroll through Hasenheide.

Exploring my new neighbourhood one idle Tuesday afternoon and ending up in a corner of the semi-infamous Hasenheide, an expansive park in the predominantly immigrant heart of Neukölln, with a reputation for being the narcotics supermarket of Berlin, watching the police and drug dealers play cat and mouse for half an hour, before making the decision to leave when I saw three police vans storm the park from all angles.

Yes, Neukölln is most definitely an interesting place to live.

More trouble with English...

And what did I tell you? Yes, “The Trouble with English” has a sequel.

Walking down the cleaning product aisle in a discount supermarket on an ordinary Wednesday afternoon, in an area of Berlin where the vast majority of residents are Turkish immigrants (just off Hermannplatz, Neukölln for those who know Berlin), I notice a Turkish guy, I’d guess in his mid 30s, standing in front of the toilet paper, muttering to himself and shaking his head. “Einfach unglaublich, wie viel das alles heuzutage kostet.” Translation not really necessary: mostly just complaining about prices, and just desperate for me to take the bait and show solidarity with him in the face of the international capitalist conspiracy against the average consumer.

And sure, he seems nice enough, but I'm not interested; I’d had a challenging day at work, was tired beyond belief, and completely not in the mood for small talk or being chatted up in front of the toilet paper.

I am however awake enough to remember that my t-shirt – out of pure coincidence – is a Gallipoli commemorative t-shirt with an Australian flag on the right side of the chest.

So I do it: I call his bluff, and play my foreigner trump card. “Sorry, I don’t, ich nicht speak Deutsch”, while inwardly cringing – even the most linguistically challenged could have managed better than that. But desperate times…

And you’d think I would have learned from Homeless Dude. Never judge a book…

“Oh, sorry. I thinked you is German. Where you come from? You live here, or on a holiday? That flag on your shirt is England, isn’t it? My cousin - ”

Bugger. Again.

This guy’s English was about the level of my Italian, but he had more front than Myers. Translated from Australian slang, that means he was damn confident. And someone with a little bit of language and a lot of confidence can be really, really annoying. He just wouldn’t shut up.

Eventually the topic of toilet paper led him into a conversational corner, which for some reason prompted him to share with me the contents of his shopping basket. Apples, Nutella, and black hair dye.

“How old are you thinking I looks today? Looks at mys hair. How old do you thinking I looks today?” Without waiting for an answer, he charges on. “Maybe 40, 45, I think I looks today, like old mans.”

Sure, he’s got a few stray grey hairs here and there. Whatever. Get to the point so I can get out of here.

“But tonight, I change – I will be young again, I will go to the bathroom – ”. I really don’t want to know any more; it’s at this point that I begin my retreat. I step past him as he continues, very obviously looking at my watch, and backing away from him towards the opposite end of the aisle. “Sorry, I really have to – ”
“Tomorrow,” he interrupts, continuing undaunted and taking a step towards me, “I look again 20 years!”
“Um, ok…” I'm now at the end of the aisle, and have again reached that point where I feel I've been subtle enough for long enough. I take a deep breath and spit it out before he can interrupt me. “I'msorrybutIhavetogo.”

Suddenly he gets that look on his face. That “sad puppy” look. And had he not invaded my perfectly alone shopping experience, I might have caved and forgiven him. But I was past the point of caring. Before I could give myself a chance to backpedal and untrample his feelings, I gave him a generic “you know how it is” smile and disappeared around the end of the aisle behind the fabric softener.

But I know without a doubt that I’ll try it again. The convenience of the linguistic “Get Out Of Jail Free Card” is irresistible. Besides, it either works like a charm or leads to great material for blog posts.

The trouble with English...

I have to admit, one of the things I love about being fluent in two languages and having skills in a further two is having the option to codeswitch, to switch into the another language and plead foreigner when people bug me – gypsies, beggars, salespeople, people handing out fliers on the street, or wanting you to sign their petition for/against [fill in the gap].

In Australia, it works like a charm – while Australians do learn languages at school, and the classics of French and the like feature, the focus is logically on Asian languages. On top of that, with the exception of people from non-English-speaking backgrounds, most people’s skills extend to a vague high school level and rarely any further. Brilliant.

In Germany, it doesn't work quite so well. Sometimes, yes, the pure shock of receiving a quick “No, thanks” to their casual icebreaker is enough to cut people off at the pass and they let you walk by. But other times I’m reminded that having English as my default switch language in Germany, or in the majority of countries in Europe, if not the world, does not have the same power that German does at home. Possibly because English is the most studied language on the planet (the often-quoted statistic that the number of native speakers of English is vastly outnumbered by the number of people learning English in China is astounding but true). By the way, my backups of French and Italian also often feature in people’s linguistic repertoire here – and their language level is almost always better than mine, so aside from the fact that my usual attire of jeans, Cons and a hoodie is nowhere near chic enough to pretend to be a Parisienne or a Florentine, I'm also linguistically out-skilled.

So the default switch remains English. And sure, sometimes you can get away with it – either because the other person’s English isn’t up to the level required or they just can’t be bothered to translate their sales pitch on the spot. Or because my Australian accent freaked them out a little.

Other times though, you weigh up the odds, and you decide to play that card, thereby calling someone’s bluff that they don’t speak English, or at least not enough to continue annoying you…

And it blows up in your face, usually in a rather spectacular fashion.

Example 1. Mid July, 2008. Sitting at a pavement table with a good friend of mine in Berlin at a cheap burger place in Kreuzberg, a very “uni student” area (cheap, alternative, and just a little grotty), happily chatting away in English over some delicious potato wedges, mayo and ketchup.

Enter random homeless guy.

He’s holding his beer as if someone might try to wrench it from his grasp at any moment, smells like a brewery and looks like he hasn’t showered in months, possibly years, but his German is remarkably non-slurred. He stands at one end of our table and starts making small talk with us – complaining about something or other, and just begging for us to start a conversation with him. Neither of us are really interested, and after politely nodding and smiling and making small talk with him in German for a few minutes, we switch back to English and continue our own conversation, hoping he’ll take this as a subtle “Please go away” signal.

He doesn't. To our horror, he takes a seat and follows our lead, switching to surprisingly fluent English. Turns out this guy lived in England for a good few years, studied at some university there (Oxford comes to mind, but I can’t remember exactly), and apparently retained his language skills.

Bugger.

For the next twenty minutes or so, we are subjected to his ramblings on all manner of topics which he thought essential to discuss with us, including an apparent dislike of America. Oh, and he also decided to bring up the Australian government’s treatment of the Aboriginal community, which he then compared to the slave trade in America. It was obvious that he had very little information about the situation or the history, and I ceased talking to him at this stage. He continued talking to, or rather at, my friend for a while, insulting America all the way. By the way, she’s American, which he knew.

We kept hoping he’d run out of steam and leave of his own accord, but he never seemed to. So, as soon as we’d finished our beers, we bid him goodnight (yeah, we’re too polite and subtle for our own good – need to learn some of that German directness), and made a run for it. He got up after us, and made a move to follow us for a few minutes, but fortunately we wove our way through the evening pedestrian traffic on Oranienstrasse and lost him.

I have no doubt that this will not be the last blog post on the dilemmas of code switching into English. Stay tuned…