Am Telefon

On the Telephone

I am terrified of the telephone here. Really. It's hard to explain unless you have ever attempted to speak a language that you are learning without being face-to-face with a person - I don't think I ever realized how much I look at a person's mouth and body language in conjunction with their speech to be able to understand what they are saying in German. In fact, I think that Marty's blog entry about the phone summarizes this fear better than I could here - you can read it here.

(By the way, you may have noticed all of the links that I recently added to the right-hand side of my blog page - they are the blogs of some of the other Fulbrighters here, which you might be interested in checking out, as everyone has been doing some really cool things.)

So, it suffices to say that I have been inventing lots of creative ways to avoid the telephone over the last couple of months. Zum Beispiel: "Going to the bathroom" if I hear it ringing; always letting my roommates pick it in the apartment; and (perhaps the worst) automatically reverting to "Ich spreche kein Deutsch - sprechen Sie Englisch?" At some point I realized how incredibly lame this was, since I have had hours-long conversations in German and am therefore certainly capable of spitting out the three or four sentences necessary to make an appointment to get my hair cut or something. Therefore, in the last couple of days, I have made a conscious decision to conquer the telephone.

My first pursuit was the call the MPI doctor (the Institute requires all of its researchers to go to a general practitioner every year, to essentially track and monitor bodily function and general health/well-being over the course of one's time in the lab) to reschedule my appointment from last week. I was absolutely terrified as the phone was ringing, but as soon as the receptionist picked up on the other end I put myself in "Deutsch mode" and did just fine. It took about two minutes and, of course, I had all of the words that I needed to say what I needed to. I know that it sounds ridiculous, since I have been ordering my food, buying train tickets and asking for directions in German for almost five months now, but I felt more accomplished with my success in this anonymous, 90-second communication than I have about any of the aforementioned situations.

My second triumph occurred yesterday morning, when I received a voicemail on my phone from the Kaufmann from an online yarn store, from which I had ordered three skeins of super-discounted cashmere/merino wool to make this. Der Kaufmann informed me that the "glacier blue" color I had picked out was leider no longer available, but he named three other colors that I could have instead. If I didn't call him back, he said he would simply cancel the order. Armed with my new self-confidence on the telephone, I called the wool store back and gave them my Bestellungnummer and told them that I would like three skeins of Farbe 526 instead. I stumbled through the conversation a bit, but the woman on the other end completely understood me, and I should have some pretty pink yarn coming my way soon.

I think that my days of "Sprechen Sie Englisch" am Telefon are over. Now I just need to learn how to speak "Yorkshire Terrier" so that I can tell a certain Toby how much I miss him...



Bis später,

Aschlan
(my apparent German alter-ego, a spelling of my name adopted by a friend of mine from the Institute)