Getting settled in

Hello readers

I hope it has been a great week for you all. With me it was a crazy week with so many activities. But let me pick up from where I left last time..

On our very first day in Germany we ‘dared’ to take a bus to meet Megha, who was allotted a place a little far away and she had earlier left by a taxi. Armed with only a very colourful map of the town and the name of the bus stop where we had to get down, me and Sajad set forth, the only consolation being the fact that this is actually a very small town. Even from my enquiries with a gentleman in our bus stop it was evident as well as shocking to me that I was communicating more with my body language and by showing the map than by actually speaking any Deutsch! All my preparations and wonderful scores in my language courses from India suddenly seemed meaningless. I couldn’t understand what he was saying and I couldn’t talk to him comfortably either. This was my first conversation in a real-life situation with a German (the taxi-driver earlier that day and my first friend in Germany was a Pakistani who offered to speak Hindi and I didn’t care to practice a few useful German sentences).

So, the next hard-hitting truth – you could be an expert in solving German grammar exercises like Dativ/Akkusativ or Activ/Passiv and the genders and plurals of all nouns etc. on a piece of paper but when it comes to simply hearing, understanding and replying back to a German, it’s a totally different ball game! This would take time, patience and a lot of perseverance. In my mother – tongue there is a proverb that says, or can be roughly translated to, ‘A picture of a Gourd in a book, is no good to make curry with. You need a real one!”

So all your german language training in your native place would probably only provide you with a comfortablestarting point, upon which you would have to build up. The ability to drive a vehicle in an open and empty field is different from actually being able to drive it in a real street with real people around. Anyway, the guy was very friendly, as almost everyone over here is, and helped me understand which bus I should be taking and whether I was standing at the right side of the road at all. The buses are really well maintained here and funnily a travel between any 2 points costs always 1.50 Euros. The buses here are well adapted to be used without much effort by elderly people and the visually impaired. In fact Marburg has the best training school for the visually impaired and they are almost completely independent in managing their daily travelling around..

We met our friend and planned for the activities for the next day. We returned by 9 pm and were not in a mood to start any cooking or whatever. We had pizzas in an Italian shop and the guy there had to be convinced thoroughly by me that I needed a ‘kleine’ pizza and not ‘keine’ pizza.

My classmates at the language course were from many different countries – Egypt, Columbia, Vietnam, Indonesia, Taiwan, Iran and South Korea, and my Lehrerin was an Austrian settled in Germany – so there was no dearth of cultural exchange and actually lots of fun. We had classes till noon, went for lunch at the Mensa afterwards and then we were free to explore the town. The first week rolled by. On the weekend there were many special shops put up on the pavements selling useful second-hand items at a cheap pr-

ice. I visited the Elizabeth Church on Saturday – this was a 13^th century church built upon the grave of St. Elizabeth. It was truly magnificient and what shook me the most were the actual tombs of many of the important Knights upto the 15^th century.

The next week the three of us met at my place for my birthday. We prepared typical south Indian dishes with materials bought from a nearby Asian shop. I believe there might be one in almost all of the German cities.

A few days later we had a Sommerfest in our house and I saw for the first time how Germans party. The essentials were all there : less to eat and more to drink, the lights, the DJ and the sound, the crowd and the dancing.. I offered to manage the entrance for about an hour in the night and it was pretty much fun to take 2 Euros from every guest and make a seal on their hands before letting them in.

I had already made a few friends on my floor, so I didn’t feel totally lost in the crowd when I went in and it was getting madder every minute. We had great fun and the noise was just starting to hit the roof. I retired around 2 :00 to my room, (which was pretty early compared to party standards). The next day I made Fruit mix/squash/shake or whatever with my German friend Stefan who needed help with the ‘detoxification’ process to get out of the party lag. I learnt it went on till 7 or 8 in the morning and the cops had to be called when someone obviously in ‘high spirits’ had tried his strength on the glass door of the entrance!

All the germans in my floor talked to me very well and were very friendly. It is here I am going to learn most of my German, I had realized. There were also some really great Americans, Mexicans and an Estonian whom I was also friends with. Sometimes, they try the Indian dishes I cook and find it too hot and spicy but still like it (“oooh.. sehr scharf”, they would say.)

I also made a visit to the Landgrafen Schloß (castle) and it was simply fascinating. Its architecture dates back to the 9^th centuty when Marburg was the first seat of residence of the Landgrave of the kingdom of Hesse. It is mostly renovated today and an important tourist attraction – particularly so for the collection of important archives and the garrisons here.

I tried row boating on the beautiful Lahn river with my friends and it was a wonderful experience. Right above us were the bridges connecting the Oberstadt with the university mensa, with people busily moving around and down below we were rowing on the quiet waters, while a group of ducks swam by..

The Oberstadt is a beautiful place full of traditional buildings and houses and many beautiful shops, cafes etc. It’s a remarkable place that you could visit on a Saturday evening to find it in all its beauty. People taking a quiet stroll, students doing part time in the cafes and busy with orders and many people posing and taking pictures next to the beautiful buildings.. Italian icecreams for 70 cents a portion are really a hit with the people here. And its 1.40 Euros for 2 portions and naturally 2.10 for 3 portions. And that brings me to a very funny incident with which I would like to close this week’s article:

I was with 2 of my classmates and we decided to buy ice-creams here. I wanted 1 portion of strawberry, my friend wanted the same and another friend wanted 2 portions – zitrone and tiramisu. I volunteered to do the talking and in all earnestness and flawless pronunciation requested – “Wir möchten zwei Erdbeere Kugeln und ein mit Zitrone und Tiramisu”. I probably got my vocabulary ok but the sentence structure skewed. Because to our horror, we saw the enthusiastic guy proceeding to take the biggest size cone and fill it up with 2 portions of Strawberry and 1 of citrone and handed it over to me and asked,” Nächste?” We stared blankly for a minute and my friend Amir tried to explain this time and got an exact replica of what I had got! The other friend, now warned enough, did more of body language and got what she wanted.. So, even when in a group in a café or a shop you are better advised to order individually.  We had a good laugh at our misadventure with the Italian ice-cream man and took fotos of our extra-large ice cream cones. We took around half an hour to finish our ice-creams..