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Kaan
the new King of Bavaria Brez'n and Lederhosen
Well, we sold our house, our cars, left our jobs, and our friends, my family and came to Munich for a change. After all, they say it's often the things you don't do in life that you regret, right? We couldn't speak any German, but fortunately Levent does have a job here, and he gets to work in English. Did I mention that when we arrived in Munich, I was very large? As in 8-months-pregnant large? Yes, we thought it would be a good idea to change nearly every aspect of our lives all at once: our son Kaan was born here two months after we arrived.
Who says Germans aren't friendly? We have definitely had some customer-service issues here (more on that later), but if it were not for the help of some of the kindest people on Earth (Judith & Horst, Kristin), let's just say this transition would have been a lot harder - and Kaan may very well have been born on the floor of our apartment because BOY do they have a different, complicated system of organizing the whole childbirth thing here. You can't just show up at the hospital, in labor, and have a baby. Well, I suppose you could, but they are not set up for that kind of lack of planning. (More on that later, too, in retrospective blogs).
Sprechen sie Englisch?... oder Turkish?... Fransozich?...Spanisch...? Sprechen sie? Learning German before we came would have been wise. Then again, it was not a real option. We found out we were coming in March, right about the time we found out I was pregnant. Then we had the moving, house-finding, visiting family, and selling everything to take care of. "Oh, don't worry, everyone there speaks English," we were told (by people who had ever been here, we don't know...). We somehow managed to interact mostly with the ones who don't speak English. Of course, Judith, Horst, and Kristin speak English better than we do, but the people at Kabel Deustchland, for example, do not. Kabel Deutschland offers digital cable television packages especially for foreigners - there's a Turkish package, an English package, a Spanish package, etcetera. So, you'd think they just might provide some customer service in, say, English, Turkish, or Spanish. But then that would require a customer service rather than a customer is pest attitude. Every conversation with them began, "Guten Tag, sprechen Sie English bitte?" and ended with "NO." We are not people who think everyone in the world should know how to speak our language - I am, after all, an ESL teacher by profession. But we were desperate here. Levent had missed dozens of soccer matches, and Kabel Deustchland had not yet set up our cable after six weeks of waiting.
Note to soccer fans moving to Germany: learn German first. At the very least, skip ahead to the chapter about having cable installed and learn that.
Very early on, exasperated and exhausted, we resorted to looking for people with Turkish name tags (Levent is Turkish, and we both speak Turkish) everywhere we went. Without the help of the Turkish community in Munich, we would not have cell phones, we would not have cable (we eventually found a Turkish employee of Kabel Deutschland), and we would have starved (we couldn't figure out the ATM - Songul Hanim helped us get to our money.)
8 months on... We have soccer (football) on tv, we have food, and our phone hasn't been canceled yet. Life is good. We live in perhaps the nicest area of Munich, we can read some of the items on menus (I don't eat meat. When we first got here, I could only eat in restaurants that had Kasespaetzle because it was the only thing I knew of that was meatless), and we are getting by. I have had one month of German classes, Levent's had two. I know enough to answer the old ladies on the bus when they ask if Kaan is "madchen oder junge" (girl or boy). I know how to answer "wie viel monaten?" (how many months). But then when the little old ladies start telling me stories or jokes, I just smile and nod my head like a bobble head. I laugh when they laugh. I hope they get off the bus before they realize I don't have a clue what they're saying. At 6 months old, Kaan does the same thing - when we laugh, he laughs. He doesn't get the joke, he just wants to be included in society - so do I 😊
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Eric
non-member comment
Great experience
What an adventure! Thanks for the insight into moving to another country and the language immersion method of learning German :-) Thank goodness for friendly people that help others when they need it. I would be much worse off knowing only a single language (unless you can count pig latin for a language ;-). I would have a lot more touble than you did! Thanks for sharing!