Lessons From the First Few Weeks
Europe is different from the United States. That much is for sure. It’s not like I expected it to be the same, I knew there would be differences, but exactly which ones I wasn’t sure about. And to be perfectly honest, most things are very slight changes. Eventually, I’ll get the hang of things around here, but it’s been a bit embarrassing for the first few weeks.
The biggest difference is the language, but all in all, that’s more of a humiliation factor than a cultural difference. Whenever I go to order something, or converse with someone in any way, I try to speak German, since I am in Germany. However, the first thing I usually say is along the lines of “Slowly please, I don’t speak German very well.” And then I get some things repeated, of which I can understand about thirty percent on average. After a few more seconds, and maybe one more exchange, the conversation crashes and burns. At this point, the German speaks nearly perfect English to me, and I feel like a failure.
That isn’t the best part though. It took me about a week and a half to realize that restaurants and cafes do not seat you here. So whenever we’d go into a place to eat, we’d look at the person standing at the door, and say the number of people we have, just like we’d do in the States. Usually they were confused… and for the longest time we thought this was again a language barrier deal. But no, it’s a combination language and culture difference. The way we finally figured this out was an embarrassment of epic proportions.
It had been a long day hiking in the Alps, when we finally reached the top of a mountain (called Tegelberg). At the top, there was a cable car station where people could skip the hike and just take the tram. Next to that station was a little cafe. So we walk in, and state the number of people in our party (two). This place is really small, there’s a bar in the corner that takes up about a quarter of the room, and there are about three tables. The guy serving people is confused. He looks at us and says in German,
“Two. Two….. what?”
After about 10 seconds of trying to figure out how to say “We want a table for two,” we give up and just take a seat. He then comes over, and said,
“Ah, two beers right?”
“Umm, no…” But we still don’t really know how to communicate to him why we said “two” when we came in.
“Ok… umm here’s the menu.” At which point, he proceeded to strike up a conversation with the rest of the cafe about how crazy we were.
“Two what, two beers, two plates, two tables, two people?” We could understand most of it. The entire place was making fun of us and laughing. Oops. We ordered a few beers and some soup to ease in a bit and had a fine meal. A family came in about twenty minutes later, and asked to exercise the second odd custom here in Germany. Different parties frequently share tables. We knew what they were asking, but before we could do anything, the guy behind the bar shouted,
“THEY DON’T UNDERSTAND YOU!”
Awesome. We moved over to allow space for the family to sit next to us, and we tried to converse in German with them. It was a bit rocky, but we did alright. At the end, we successfully told the waiter in German that we were finished(fertig), and asked for the check to be separate(getrennt).
Feeling pretty good about ourselves, and a bit happy from the tall ones we had, we set off down the mountain. We notice a trail that looks significantly shorter on the way down labeled with nothing but the words “Alpine Gefahr.” At this point we had figured out that this meant “Alpine Danger.” Awesome. Sounds fun, let’s do it.
Fifteen minutes in, the trail is lame. Nowhere near as dangerous as the one we came up on, which had sheer cliffs of several hundred feet with no guard fence, or rope, or anything. Five minutes later, we come to a place where there is a chain you need to hold so you can scale across a rock cliff. It’s only about 30 or so feet, but we were a little surprised.
Twenty minutes after that, we were so far over our heads, we didn’t know how we got there. ”Alpine Gefahr” turned into “Lebensgefahr” which is “life-threatening.” There were no signs to indicate Lebensgefahr, but we knew just by looking at the path. It ended up being pretty much rappelling down a rock cliff using chains that were hanging off of the rock. It was fun, but in retrospect, very dangerous. At the bottom, we notice a sign that says “Gesperrt.” We didn’t know what it meant, but we had a theory. After getting back to Munich, we figure out that “Gesperrt” means “Closed.” Fantastic.
Next time, we’re bringing a dictionary, and maybe a trail map. Neither of which we had for this trip.