Last Friday my friends and I were faced with a dilemma. Dedicated SLA blog readers will remember from my last post that there is currently a worldwide football tournament going on that the residents of Munich—and by association I—have taken great interest in. However, between the group stage and the knockout stage of this tournament there is a one-day break, a sorrowful day on which there are no football matches. This day was last Friday. So, you see, this was the difficult situation we found ourselves in: we had to find something to do in Munich besides watch football.
Naturally it wasn’t easy for a group of 18-24-year-old international visitors to find something to do on a Friday in a major European city, but through luck alone and also the internet we did find something going on on this day: a music festival featuring names such as Earth, Wind, and Fire—a band known for noted dorm party song September—and Alanis Morissette—a singer known for not understanding what irony is.
(Myself and friends outside the festival; by the time of the second picture you can see that many of us are tired of taking pictures.)
This festival also included a large flee market. And I truly believe that the best way to gain an intimate understanding of the intricacies of a culture is to look through people of this culture’s old clothes and speak with the sellers. What I learned is twofold: Germans have some excellent headwear and most vendors prefer to speak English than broken German with foreigners. Nevertheless, after engaging a vendor in a German conversation, I came to the very difficult decision to not buy a hat.
What I instead bought was a train ticket to Salzburg, Austria to visit someone I would normally have to walk all the way down the hallway to see. I am speaking of a friend of mine from Notre Dame, who graciously offered for me to come visit him and stay with his family in Salzburg. Despite an early confidence drainer of speaking with his 13-year-old sister, whose English is already significantly better than my German, I had a wonderful trip. I climbed a mountain, had a 20-minute German conversation about nothing but small talk with a woman my friend knew, and spoke only German with his family at meals (or, more accurately, mostly listened to them speak really fast German at meals).
A video I took from the peak of the mountain in Salzburg
In conclusion, this family told me that they noticed an improvement in my German, so if they are to be trusted (and I think they are; they’re a wonderful group of people), then I’m doing something right. If I had to guess the improvement is exclusively the result of hearing the German announcers of football games, but who knows. Until next time, dearest blog reader.