my second official interaction with an austrian stranger was unexpected, but did not go as badly as it could have. i think it was a good demonstration of how much better i've gotten.
i ordered my eurail ticket for next month a few days ago. because i did a stupid thing and waited too long to get this out of the way, i had to get it speed delivered before we leave the dorm, and i was very nervous that it would arrive too late and i would have had wasted $300! but yesterday, a note was left for me on our building. we figured it was from a package company and they couldn't get into the building for the mail. this morning, i called the number and spoke (auf Englisch) to the receptionist, and she said they would leave it outside the building if i wasn't outside to pick it up.
well, actually, some hours later around 11:30, i got a call from a strange austrian number. i answered, and deciphered that it was the package delivery. i asked, "sprechen Sie Englisch?" and he said no, to my surprise. that's never happened before. anyway, he kept talking and i ascertained that he was outside and he was asking me if i could also come down. i told him "ja, ich jetzt kommen" repeatedly but he kept talking and talking, and i eventually got through to him that "ich bin hier!" and "ich komme in zwei minuten". i got downstairs and greeted him and his package trolley. i forgot a little bit about what happened here, but successfully completed the package receiving ritual completely in german. so now i have my eurail ticket a few days early and a strange interaction with a strange person!
i told a few people about this, and they agreed that having to talk on the phone to someone in a different language is really difficult. it is, because you don't get the body language -- none to see if the other person understands you, none to gesture to help communicate your meaning, etc. but i could actually understand him about as well as i could people i speak to in person. maybe it was because there were less distractions. also, this only furthered my belief that i usually only have to understand two or three words in a sentence to get the meaning, which is what i've been doing for the last week.
yesterday amber told me that my german has improved a lot from the beginning. hearing people like her and erik say this gives me a lot more confidence. as i've said before, it gives me some arbitrary checkpoint of progress to have other people observe and give me feedback. i'm thinking back to the first weeks, and yeah, i have gotten a lot better. in cultura wien, i can speak much more fluidly and speak in german to the professors about 95% of the time (unlike the other three people from our group, who are at about 50%. speaking of this, i'm so sick of them telling these stories to our classes, mostly if not entirely in english about things that are completely irrelevant to everyone else. if they were told in german, it wouldn't be so bad. however, i'm pretty sure that the austrian, german, romanian, polish, or italian people in our night class give no Scheiße about the homeless population in richmond. i feel like this is a very american thing to do. maybe i'm taking this way too seriously, but no, i do feel like it's pretty arrogant to go on and on about this type of thing, and again it would be a different story if they were talking in german. but since they weren't, it was like they thought talking about some small, relatively unknown city in america was the most important thing we could be doing.)
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