Breaking the Language Barrier

Part of the impetus for Emily’s and my Europe trip is a friend’s wedding, to be held this June in a small town in Germany called Diez. Since we needed to bring formal wear for that anyway, we decided to dress up for the opera in Prague as well (there’s technically no dress code, though I think our usual travel wear wouldn’t have made us any friends). Afterwards, we figured we could mail the clothes to Diez, saving ourselves both the hassle of carrying them for the next three months and the expense of shipping them across the Atlantic. To do so required a large cardboard box and a trip to the post office.

Metric Fish

Little things like this, so trivial in your own country, can prove a major hassle (or adventure, if you want to be good-natured about it) in an unfamiliar place. We carried the clothes from Prague to Berlin, where there was a post office just across the street from the apartment we’d rented for the week in Prenzlauer Berg. I assumed we could buy boxes there, if perhaps at a premium price.

As it happened, they didn’t have any large enough for our needs. I checked a paper goods store across the street – no luck. Went home, googled it, and, through the magic of internet, found that someone else had already asked exactly my question. The answer was “any home goods store”. There was one a few blocks from the apartment, so I walked up there… and they had no shipping materials of any kind.

I again returned home dejected and started asking the Germans I knew where they would go to find a box. They were all surprised that the post office didn’t have it. I specified that it needed to be at least 320 x 320 x 640. One of my friends asked, “320 what? Millimeters?”

“Centimeters,” I wrote back.

“Andrew that is the size of a small room. You could pack up your clothes and then climb into that box and ship yourselves to the wedding.”

OK, so I’m a metric fish. They didn’t have a box to accommodate me in millimeters, either, though, so my search hadn’t been needless, even if I still hadn’t found what I was looking for.

We had to leave our apartment the next day, so I took our recycling out to the specially designated dumpster in the courtyard of the building. There, sitting on the top of the paper container, was a perfectly sized and perfectly preserved cardboard box from Amazon. I grabbed it eagerly, and sure enough it was just what we needed! Unfortunately it was now too late and the post office was closed, so I was going to have to take the package over the next morning before we moved out.

Wie Bitte?

We generally got around with no difficulty relying on our limited German and the English that is widely spoken in Berlin. The post officewas a different story, though. The employees were all disgruntled middle-aged bureaucrats who either couldn’t or wouldn’t speak English. I learned a fair bit of German in the last two months in preparation for this trip, but not nearly enough to manage a transaction like this with words alone.

Especially for someone like me, who prides himself on his verbal acuity in his native language, being unable to communicate with words is an unsettling, humbling, and uncomfortable experience. It’s something I have to actively push myself to overcome, because if I gave in to my nervousness, I’d find myself taking my meals at McDonald’s and Starbucks and experiencing new places from the confines of a tour bus.

So I swallowed my pride and marched into the post office. The woman at the next available station said something in German. “Guten Morgen,” I greeted her, laying my items on the counter. She said something else in German.

“Wie bitte?” I answered. That means something like “Pardon” or “Come again.” A fancy way of asking someone to repeat herself, it’s unideal for my purposes because it both suggests I speak more German than I do and fails to get at the root of the problem, which is that no matter how many times she repeats herself or how clearly she speaks, I’m simply not going to know what her words mean.

She repeated whatever she said. I gave her a blank, helpless stare, and resisted the urge to run. She was not amused, but I stood my ground. She didn’t have to like it – I had after all come to her country without speaking her language and was now inconveniencing her with my ignorance – but the simple fact of the matter was that I needed to mail this package and I didn’t speak German. Like it or not, we were going to have to figure out a way to do this.

With a sigh, she pointed to a scale. Now we were getting somewhere. I lifted the awkwardly large box and maneuvered it towards the scale. As I did so, I knocked over a container of brochures that was sitting on the counter. It fell, scattering its glossy contents all over the floor behind her. She glowered malevolently at me over the rims of her glasses, which rode low on her nose. “Entschuldigung,” I muttered sheepishly, my face burning with embarassment. Sorry.

I placed the box on the scale as she retrieved the brochures. “Normal oder blahblahblah” I heard.

“Normal, bitte,” I answered eagerly, glad to finally understand a question well enough to answer it in German. I didn’t need express service or anything like that, so I was pretty sure “Normal” would do it for me.

At an American post office, you get a lot of follow-up questions. Do you want delivery confirmation? Insurance? Anything hazardous in the box? I don’t know if they don’t do that in Germany, or if she just recognized the futility of asking me, but the next thing she said was the cost. I paid using exact change, to show her that I understood the number, but it didn’t seem to endear me to her any.

Game Theory Without Borders

No matter. The box was out of my hands and on its way to Diez. I embarrassed myself and made an enemy, but the world didn’t come to an end. Ultimately, I did what I needed to do, no one got hurt, and nothing bad happened. I’ll never see that woman again, and not having to lug those clothes back and forth across the continent was well worth a few minutes of social awkwardness.

It was also a good confidence builder for future cross-cultural interactions. Not everyone is eager to communicate with grunts and pantomiming, but ultimately most will once you make clear that there’s no other option.

It’s basic game theory, really. In a game of chicken, where two people drive towards each other at high speeds and the first one to veer away from a collision loses, the optimal play is to remove your steering wheel and let your opponent see you throw it out of the window. Once he knows that you couldn’t turn your car even if you wanted to, he’s got no choice but to turn his (assuming he prioritizes surviving over winning).

Once you make clear that there’s really no alternative to a slightly awkward and embarrassing game of charades, most people will play along even if they don’t like it. Some even end up having fun with it. Those people get tips. So please take note, European service employees: there are some benefits to dealing with American tourists.