Today I went with my host-mother and -brother to a small town outside of Hannover to celebrate her brother-in-law's (Hermann's) birthday. Needless to say, explaining my reason for being there to those who I met, and in German at that, was a bit complicated. It was a lot of fun, though! We arrived a little bit late due to an extremely unhelpful map, but finally made it and sidled over to our seats while the priest, also a good friend of Hermann's, was giving a speech. After much seat-shuffling I ended up at the "young people" table which was full of people round-about my age. I met mostly friends of Hermann's children who were also at somewhat of a loss in joining in with the family conversation. Over the course of the afternoon I met and conversed with two people in particular: A friend of Hermann's daughter who is currently living with the family before she leaves on a year-long mission to India, and the boyfriend of one of Hermann's daughter's friends who works at Dräger Medical. It goes without saying that relationships to people and reasons for being there took a fair bit of explaining and time to understand before actual conversation began.
I started talking to the guy who works at Dräger which I was thankfully familiar with after our visit to the anaesthesia museum on Thursday. He works in what I guess would be considered quality control for their consumable and medical device product lines and is a total fan of their treatment of their employees. The corporate headquarters is in Lübeck, which I'm told is about a ten minute drive from the Ostsee beaches. Also, the entire town turns into a Christmas market for the month of December, sometimes starting earlier. The company keeps very nice grounds with open, green spaces and allows their workers a good amount of time off to ward off the "burnout" syndrome that supposedly has been streaking across Germany in recent years. He works in a very multicultural environment, with Masters and PhD students from places like Japan and the US working in close-quarters with him. Apparently his most recent personal "project" was to refresh his English, which he has been doing by interacting with his American officemate solely in English. For two months of practice after a fair amount of time not speaking English, he could have fooled me for one who spoke it every day since he had first learned it.
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| The Tamil language, which the girl is learning for her trip |
While we were talking, a girl had been listening and finally decided to join in after hearing the bit about the English refresher. She will be leaving for India in October, and since German is not so widely spoken over there, was glad for a chance to practice her English. She was a bit more rusty than the guy I had been talking to, but our Denglisch (Like Spanglish, but with Deutsch) managed to convey everything pretty well. Our conversation focused a lot on travel, languages, and cultures, and how you can't really do any one of them without adding in the other two. An example is all of the idioms that a language has. Thankfully her example of the apple not falling far from the tree made sense to me, but one who doesn't understand might say, "of course it doesn't--the branch it fell from is part of the tree!" But to understand many more complex idioms, you have to become familiar with the culture. No matter how many books you read about a region's culture and how many language classes you might take, nothing is ever as valuable as actually visiting the place where they speak the language and live the culture. I have definitely noticed this in my time here, but for someone to go to India from a place like Germany would be even more eye-opening, I would imagine.
Like all good things and fun times, this one also came to an end and resulted in another three-hour drive back to Bonn. It was definitely an unique experience today, speaking with these new people who I initially had little in common with and learning about their lives.
I'll be back on Wednesday for my Directed Studies visit--looking forward to it!
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