This past week was a pretty stressful one. Part of the problem is that my manager left on Thursday for a three-week vacation to visit his relatives in Namibia(!) -- before he left, he wanted to get everything for the next three weeks squared away, which meant a lot of long, tedious meetings, all in German. (And if we wanted to stay late and finish our next three weeks of work before he left, that would have been okay, too . . . )
My German is good enough to follow virtually everything that happens in these meetings (and thankfully, technical German and technical English share a lot of similar-sounding words), but it takes a tiring amount of concentration for me to do so. And even though I may be 'getting it', it doesn't take much to slip up in the eyes of my colleagues -- ask for something to be repeated before answering a question, and I risk getting a complete re-recitation in English (no, I was understanding you, I just didn't hear your last sentence); don't ask enough questions or make enough comments, and I'm obviously not understanding (no, I understand what you're talking about, but pipelining is outside my area of expertise, so I don't have any meaningful comments to make).
I let individual people decide how they want to approach me, linguistically; if someone wants to speak English, that's fine; on the other end, I have some co-workers who want to speak nothing but German. With most people, I end up speaking "Germlish" -- German, until I run beyond my vocabulary and have to start bringing in English words. In social situations, I feel like I can hold my own and jump into the conversational flow when I want to. There were a lot of questions for me about US politics and the American electoral process around the lunch table this past week; unfortunately, I had to drop into Germlish to explain how the primary system works. ("If it sounds confusing, don't worry -- a lot of Americans don't understand it either.")
The weekend was much more restful. On Saturday, we didn't do much more than shop for groceries (making a thrilling discovery; see below) and a few dearly-needed necessities for me: a new pair of shoes (my old ones were getting, um, air-conditioned) and a transit pass (a no-brainer: the pass costs 49 Euro a month, while it would cost me at least 80 Euro in single-ride tickets just to go to and from work each month). While we were shopping, it started to snow and continued snowing late into Saturday night. We woke up on Sunday to a winter wonderland: Scout and I went out and walked around in the snow for a couple of hours.
Pictures of our snow day -- including Scout wearing her much-hated but oh-so-cute doggie sweater -- are coming soon. (The forecast for the next few days has been wavering between blue skies, light snow, and rain, so yesterday might have been the single good snow day that we'll get while we're here.)
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| Who could pass up a bottle of wine with such a fine-looking label? | My transit pass; Nobody expects ID photos to look great, but this is quite possibly the worst photo of me ever taken. |