Cross-Cultural

Across the stone patio, a pair of sweet blue eyes blinked at me in question, patient and content, and on the inside I felt the exact opposite—a frenzy of confusion and hopelessness.

                It was a beautiful day in Munich, Germany and I sat outside of a small café after our travelling choir had performed that morning, lost in the chatter of my adopted roommates and the small birds that flitted from table to table around us. I was lost in the city, in the beauty, in the jet lag, when my friend, Katlyn, sitting next to me leaned in.

                “Emily, I think that man is trying to talk to us,” she said. I looked past her to my right, and sure enough, at the table next to us there was a small, elderly German man looking directly at the five of us and speaking clearly in German. We all shifted our attention and asked him if he could please repeat himself, we hadn’t heard. He continued speaking in German for a few seconds, and then paused with the distinctive lift of a question.

                “Sorry,” I said. I fumbled for some bit of German. “No sprechen sie Deutsche.”

                The man nodded with a bright smile, yet continued to speak in German, now setting down his newspaper and leaning forward. Confused, we glanced at one another, unsure of how to continue. My friend Bailey shook her head, repeating, “I’m sorry. We don’t speak German. No Deutsche. American.”

                At this, the man’s eyes lit up and he sat all the way forward in his chair. He had abandoned all thought of his pork schnitzel on the plate in front of him, and was focused on his new American friends.

                “America?? Why?” he said. We all looked at one another and tried to piece together what exactly he was asking us. He stared enthusiastically and glanced from one of us to the next. I assumed he meant what most people we had talked with meant: why are we visiting their country?

                “We’re in a choir. We sing in a group,” I said. I waited. The expression on his face remained the same. A bright smile, big eyes, eagerly awaiting a response. “Music, we sing music. In your cathedral, Munich Cathedral.” My voice grew higher, trying not to offend this man with my lack of German knowledge. He clearly did not understand a word of what came out of my mouth, and the panic set in. I was the ultimate tourist at that moment, lost in a culture I didn’t understand and unsure where to go from there. I had no idea how to explain to this man what I was doing in his country or to communicate anything at all to him. I looked across the table and saw the same helpless worry in my friends’ eyes, and before we knew it we were laughing and she began to sing. We sang two complete pages of Ave Maria in three part harmony for this man, pointing at the Cathedral in the distance and gesturing to our uniform polos and braids that we had done on the bus that morning, saying internally, We match. We’re a group.

                He looked delighted. That was well and good, but he still didn’t understand a lick of what we were trying to communicate. He patted his shoulder, and began to speak again. In German. Again. He seemed very intent on telling us whatever this message was. He looked blissfully happy, but we could see a tear began to slip onto his cheek. At the end he nodded. “Schwester,” he said. “Meine schwestern.” He stared at us with less intensity now, more familiarity.

                “Schwestern,” I repeated. “I’m so sorry. But we don’t speak German. No sprechen sie Deutsche. We don’t understand, sir. I’m so, so sorry.”

                “Excuse me?” a man from a different table got up and walked over. “I hear that you don’t understand. He is saying you look like his sisters. When he was young. Zopfe. The hair, how you have done. He says his sisters have the same.” With this, he patted the old man on the shoulder and returned to his seat. The elderly man nodded, having grown very quiet and solemn.

                “Sister,” he nodded. “Zopfe.” He made the braiding motion with his hands and patted his shoulder again.

                Thinking back, I think to that man, we were his sisters. I think he spoke to us in German because to him, we represented something like home to him, we were Germany to this man and not America. This interaction, although brief, made me realize that it doesn’t matter what language you speak to someone. We made an impact on this man, and he made an impact on us. By the end of our lunch, we might not have understood this man’s words, but we understood him and his country more deeply than we could have from any sort of museum or tourist pamphlet.