Episode 19: Adventure ReCall | Popcorngate (my most embarrassing moment abroad… EVER! )

Okay, here goes nothing…

In 2003, I move to Germany with my first real girlfriend named Anja. We have been together two years at that point, though we're young, she's 21. I'm 23. So the relationship had a bit of that off and on quality that young relationships often do.

We meet in Guatemala where I'm teaching fourth and fifth grade at a bilingual school and Anja is a bartender at a German bar there. She makes cash tips and a bit of local wages, but nothing much. And I make a whopping $250 a month. So we know we can't stay here forever since we can't even afford to fly home.

US immigration feels too hard to try and get her there. So we decided to move together to Germany.

I know nothing about Germany. I spent all of college learning about Latin America. I know specific things like Costa Rican linguistics, and the educational theories of Paulo Freire. But I'm only somewhat cognizant of World War II and I have no idea what the Iron Curtain is, or that I'm about to move to a city that was behind it.

Moving to Erfurt, Germany

At first, things like this, they really don't matter. We fly to Frankfurt in October of 2003 and drive to Erfurt, the capital city of a state called Thuringia. To me it doesn't feel East German or West German. It feels like how I imagined Europe to feel - really modern, silently wishing trams sliding through narrow roads and old buildings. There are beer gardens, outdoor dining on plazas and people were, of course, speaking German all around me.

Since I don't speak a word of this stuff, I'm rendered silent.

For a long time, the world is hustling and bustling, but it's like I'm on the other side of a window. I see life being lived, but I'm isolated from joining it.

There aren't many foreigners here and I don't have a job yet. So I don't really have anyone to talk to but Anja.

Anja is part of the last generation of kids born into the communist East Germany. When she was 10 or so Erfurt and the rest of the former German Democratic Republic or East Germany opened up and reunified with the West, but Erfurt didn't suddenly become cosmopolitan.

The city did, however, get MTV Europe and American sitcoms on TV.

Without much contact at all to real foreigners Anja somehow got completely fluent in English to the point where she could pass for an American as much as a Russian spy could. She would have made a great spy.

But she doesn't have a lot of friends left in Erfurt and we can't just talk to ourselves.

Luckily, we discover a Cuban bar.

And although I don't understand why there are so many Cubans in Erfurt, I can at least speak to them whenever we go for Cuba Libres, or rum and cokes. 

It takes about a year for me to really understand that communist Cuba and formerly communist Erfurt would have had intercultural exchanges and a more liberal immigration policy back when East Germany was behind the Iron Curtain.

Alive for the first time

And while I feel really alone, but I also feel really, truly alive for the first time. I'm not just connected to the present moment here, I'm living among the real world effects of geopolitical shrapnel and I start piecing it together on my own through my own observations.

I'm collecting clues and trying to figure out the world around me without really being able to talk to anyone about it.

I'm too proud to admit that I'm one of those Americans who doesn't know world history, or for whom European history had just been a class in high school that I opted not to take.

Much of my time was spent like this being a detective.

For example, in Germany, buildings tend to have the date it was built somewhere within the brick near the top of the building,

I would notice those dates and the architecture types, and I started to realize that if a city center had many modern buildings, sometimes more than old ones, often it was these areas with new construction that were bombed during one of the wars.

As long as I live, I'll never forget getting lost on a walk down an alley and seeing a white clay building with signage that said it was built in the year 780 AD.

World history was alive for me for the first time.

At the same time that I'm trying to put together world history, and I'm trying to get a job and make some friends who speak English. I'm also trying to learn German. German is nothing like Spanish at all. If I read Italian or French, there's a gist I can grab hold of, but with German, there's no gist, I'm like a newborn baby. I need pictures and small words and a lot of patience.

I read everything, I can get my hands on gossip magazines about familiar celebrities, I read baby books at the big bookstore on the town square. I studied train schedules, the back of the cereal box, the shampoo in the shower. I look for patterns and anything similar to English that I can hold onto.

So within the first two months, I have two full time jobs teaching English at a language school and a business school. It turns out, being in a city like Erfurt that doesn't have a lot of native English speakers, means there's a lot of work available for someone like me to teach English. That also means I don't have time to take a German class, but I never take my eye off the ball. I'm always looking for ways to learn.

Becoming a language detective

I become obsessed with this thing called Apfelschorle.

I had it at a restaurant and now I want to buy it every time I'm at the store. It's really just apple juice and seltzer water mixed together. But it comes mixed. It's considered soda. Coca Cola actually sells it.

So I'm at the grocery store and I'm hunting for the drink. And I know the word ‘Apfel’ means apple.

So I'm looking for it and I end up in what I'm guessing is the juice aisle.

I see a carton with an apple. It says Apfel. But it doesn't say Apfelschorle. It says Apfel and then Saft.

Next to it, I see a box with an orange on it and it says Orangensaft, so I figure out using my detective skills that these are both juices and that the word for juice is Saft. That's how I learned. I use this method of triangulating to figure out new words and phrases. I know the word Apple, I can figure out that the word Orange is orange. So Saft must be juice.

Everyone is forced to speak English to me at first, but in Erfurt people aren't really that fluent. That's why I have so much work to do. So they make a lot of mistakes. I realized pretty early on that I can learn from their mistakes. The first time I realize this is with my boss and our school secretary.

I work a lot of evenings since a lot of working adults take English after work. So my boss and the Secretary leave before I do and they always say okay, We See Us Tomorrow. At first I think this is just a cute mistake. Then later I'm out on the town square and I see these two girls my age. I'm 23 or 24 at the time and they're the kind of girls I would have wanted to be friends with. So I'm paying more attention to them than the other people around me. 

Wir sehen uns morgen

The two girls go their separate ways and one says okay, ‘Wir sehen uns morgen.’  And then they leave.

By now, I know all those words, Wir sehen uns morgen.I know that ‘Wir’ is we and ‘sehen’ is to see, ‘uns’ is us and ‘Morgen’ is tomorrow. And then it just clicks, Wir sehen uns morgan is how friends say goodbye to each other. They don't say see you tomorrow, they say, ‘we see us.’

So all the time when the secretary or my boss was saying We see us tomorrow, they were just translating from their first language. So I realized that I can learn German from the mistakes that people make speaking English to me. So I add this to my repertoire of German detective skills. That's how I start learning from almost every interaction, every mistake that someone else makes empowers me to become more fluent.

The more I learn, the more confident I get in my detective skills. And I stopped looking for as much validation for that triangulation I was talking about. I make assumptions, I'm getting better at being right or right enough that I don't really doubt myself anymore.

I might not be able to translate everything exactly or know the exact nuance of a word, but I'm getting it.

And one thing I love to do as I get better and better at German is go to the movies. I love going to the movies in foreign countries, I do it as often as possible. I did it in Costa Rica and Guatemala and I'm doing it here in Germany.

Living abroad can be a constant pull on your senses. And there's nothing like the low pressure situation like the movies.

You're totally immersed. You're doing something cultural, you're doing something with the locals, but really, you're just in a dark room. No one's going to talk to you. You don't have to talk to anyone and you get to watch a movie.

Sometimes I leave the theater not knowing at all what I just watched. But I get a lot out of the experience. And that's enough for me.

Of course, my favorite part of going to the movies is shoveling a bunch of popcorn in my mouth in a dark room and shove popcorn. And in Germany, you can order salty popcorn or sweet popcorn, which I find fascinating. Walking up to the counter for the first time. I quickly learned that the word for popcorn in German is popcorn. It’s pronounced popcorn but it's popcorn.

Okay, so enough stalling. Here we go. Just remember that I know the word for popcorn is Popcorn. Okay?

Popcorn isn’t popcorn

Okay, so the other way I'm able to get so fluent in German without taking any classes is because I have a built in family when I arrive in our fort. We live with Anja’s mom for the first two months. She understands English, but she's too embarrassed to speak it. So I speak English with her and she replies in German. I just have to figure out what she's saying. There are also all these family parties all the time with aunts and uncles, cousins in laws and it is grandma.

So one Sunday, like most Sunday afternoons, we're having coffee and cake together with the family.

It's one of the best traditions I know in Germany. On Sundays, most things are closed. You can't really run any errands and everything slows down to a sugar-filled stop.

While the coffee leaves much to be desired, the cakes are amazing. There are always so many kinds of cake no matter where you go, no matter whose house you go to. There's always so many kinds of cake. Some are dry cakes, like pancakes, some have crumbles on top. Some are filled with this cream cheese thing called Quark which everybody likes. There are always so many varieties because no one just has one piece.

You see in Germany, while restaurant portion sizes both food and drinks are always tiny and always leave me wanting more, when it's time to eat cake. Germans go nuts. I love watching Germans go in for two, sometimes even three pieces of cake during the Kaffeekuchen Zeit. That means coffee cake time.

Anyway, so we're at Anja’s grandma's apartment in a village called Hohenfelden, just outside the city. Anja, her grandma who they call Omi, and me, we're in a small kitchen and the rest of the family is in the living room. The apartment is small, so everyone, of course, is within earshot. 

Now when I am with Omi, I'm always so mesmerized by something ‘old-worldy’ that happens. But once she took us walking through a forest, we pick mushrooms, how did she know which ones to pick? And then we came home and we cooked them up in a recipe and we ate them.

Now on this particular day. Omi is roasting a bunch of seeds in a pan. And Anja and I are standing looking on behind her. I realize I've never done anything as natural and serene as watching her roast this variety of healthy seeds in a pan.

I realize I've never even thought about roasting seeds or kernels. I wonder do these ever pop the way popcorn does? I figure they don't. But I'm just going to make a little quippy comment about them popping, you know to, like, practice my German.

At most, I expect the following reaction. I'm going to say something like these don't pop like popcorn, do they? And only will say, haha, no, Jesse, they don't pop. That's what I expect to happen. So I build my sentence in my head. I know that the word for popcorn is popcorn.

And I know that the verbs are often similar to the noun. So like in English, the verb is to pop. In German the verb would be Poppen. Now if you're German, you're already laughing at me.

I know how to construct a verb and I know that the word ‘Sie’ means both ‘you’ like the formal ‘you’ as well as ‘they’. So for example, ‘sie essen’ either means ‘you eat’ or ‘they eat’. So I figure to ask whether the seeds pop, I don't know the word for ‘seeds’ so I have to say ‘they’ so I'll ask if they pop. I'm just gonna say to Omi, do they pop? That's all.

Okay, so A + B + C, I put my grammar together. I look only straight in the face. And I innocently asked this sweet grandmother the following question.

Poppen Sie? 

The blood drains from her face until she's completely pale. Then it shoots right back up like a thermometer. Beet red. 

Everything goes silent. 

The proverbial music stops. 

I hear one stifled giggle, a guffaw really, from the living room. And Anja, she looks at me like I'm an alien. An enemy. Like she's never even known me. My entire body seizes up. She's just glaring at me. Just glaring that I see it click in our head. Suddenly she knows what I'm asking.

She breathes out and then just cracks up. She bends over, covers her mouth and is cracking up. Omi, who is standing there still aghast, looks at Anja. Really. she’ll look anywhere not to look at me. I am beet red. I'm so hot. Suddenly, the kitchen is so warm. My hands are sweaty. This is all taking place within three seconds. But I'm like 10 degrees hotter than I was three seconds ago.

Anja stands straight, awkwardly puts her hands on her hips, looks at Grandma, and explains what I must have meant.

The living room explodes with relieved laughter. Omi looks at me really sweetly, with a little pity, and awkwardly waves it off and goes back to roasting the seeds.

And then Anja explained it to me. Even though I'm not really asking. I don't even want to know. I just want to disappear. She explains to me very kindly that while yes, popcorn is Popcorn, the verb ‘Pop’ means, well... it means ‘To F*ck.’ Not make love or have sex. Nope, the full on F word. I have asked Anja’s Omi if she f*cks in her kitchen while she cooks me food. And I've done this in perfect grammar, it turns out so she thought I really meant it.

We haven't even had the coffee and cake yet. So now I have to shuffle out into the living room where everyone's cracking up. And I sit down and try and shuffle some of this cake in my face.

In the end, it was fine. And honestly, no one ever really makes fun of me for it again. It was all really lighthearted and they have sympathy for me trying to learn their language.

Does that mean I've ever forgotten it? Nope. And I still want to disappear. But you know what, nine times out of 10. That detective work that I was doing. It did work. That's how I learned. So if one time out of ten, I asked someone's grandma if they F in front of their entire family in the most vulgar way possible. Totally worth it. Every day you make a little mistake. You're stronger, more fluent, more informed and more capable. Popcorngate is going to happen to you if you take a risk like moving abroad to a foreign country, but it's always worth it.

About adventure Calls

Adventure Calls is produced, edited and written by me, Jessica Drucker. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please subscribe, then head over to iTunes or wherever you listen to podcasts and rate and review the show. Every single rating helps so much for me to reach and inspire more people. If you're feeling really inspired and want to start thinking about how you can actually make your move abroad, pick up a copy of my book on Amazon, How To Move Abroad And Why It's The Best Thing You'll Do is essentially a masterclass in book form. Taking my 15 years experience living abroad and distilling that into 300 pages, you'll get step by step tips on how to move abroad in 90 days, how to get your paperwork together, how to get a visa advice on how to blend in like a spy, how to learn any language in the world and head to amazon.com and pick up your copy of How To Move Abroad And Why It's The Best Thing You'll Do today.

Music scoring primarily through YouTube Audio Library:
Campfire by Delicate Steve 
Si Señorita - Chris Haugen 
Festival De Cuba - Doug Maxwell_Jimmy Fontanez 
Lurking - Silent Partner 
Wehrmut - Godmode German 
Interchange - Public Memory 
Glen Canyon - Dan Lebowitz 
Russian Dance - Joey Pecoraro 
Let Go - Riot_Bill and Ted nostalgic 
English Country Garden - Aaron Kenny 
A Baroque Letter - Aaron Kenny 
Whole Tone Limbo - Godmode 
Under The Rug - Density & Time
Elevators Need Rock Too - Spence_1