I lived in Germany in 1992 with my boyfriend. The Berlin Wall had been down for three years when we moved there. We lived in East Germany in the city of Dresden outside of town. The experience ticked off all my fears: new experiences, lack of communication, strange places, and traveling alone. All activities I try to avoid. Throughout our time there, I found that humor helped get me through each day.
Dresden
Our first apartment had a sitting room, a closet with three single beds, and a room with a shower and a sink. The toilet was outside the apartment and down a flight of stairs on a landing in a medium-sized closet. Our toilet was on the right side. The toilet on the left belonged to an elderly woman who had an apartment in the building. The water closet, as it was called, had no sink or mirror. It was like two outhouses got misplaced inside. This arrangement made for awkward situations, which I’m sure you can imagine. Before this, I had never heard of an apartment without a private toilet. I’m not sure why it’s more uncomfortable to share a restroom in your home than it is to share a bathroom at work, but it is.
The shower was called a Russky shower. On first use, we had difficulty. It looked like a shower, but it was unlike any shower we had ever seen. The shower came with instructions pasted on the side in Russian. If you don’t speak Russian and have never used a shower such as this before, do not use it when running late. Skip your shower that first morning.
The base of the shower was two feet high. The knobs controlling the shower and instructions were on the side of the base. The square-shaped shower curtain rod sat on top of a long pole, which meant that the shower curtain turned into a billowy skirt during the shower, ignoring its job to keep water off the bathroom floor.
During the first shower, we learned what not to do. Do not turn on the water and get in before you turn on the heater, and let the water warm up for 10-15 minutes. If you get into the shower, and it is, say, freezing-ass cold, you might be inclined to jump out quickly. Since the base is higher than you expect, the floor is slick with water, and since you have nothing to grab onto, you may slide across the floor bare-assed into the opposite wall of the bathroom whilst screaming obscenities. And yes, you would be correct in guessing that this experience will put you in a bad mood for your first day of work.
Grocery Shopping
I’m not a good cook, and I dislike grocery shopping more than cooking because I end up wandering around and around looking for things. Occasionally, I’ve decided to go without rather than search the grocery store aisles endlessly.
In Dresden, every week, I marched into the grocery store, ready for battle, with a list and a translation dictionary. My command of German is weak, my pronunciation is worse, and my ability to read German is non-existent. I eventually quit looking. Instead, I would find the German word for the item in my dictionary and stop a fellow shopper. I knew how to ask where something was, “Wo ist die?” I quickly realized that my pronunciation was so bad that my questions didn’t make sense. I stopped searching for the proper German word and played charades instead. For example, if I couldn’t find the chicken, I asked, “Wo ist die…” and clucked like a chicken whilst flapping my arms. Or I snorted like a pig. Once, I asked a guy on the street where to find an alarm clock. I laid my head on my hands like a pillow while snoring loudly. Then I said, “Beep, beep, beep,” very loudly and opened my eyes. The man pointed to a store a few doors away where I bought an alarm clock. I said, “Danke,” which I pronounced beautifully, if I do say so myself.
Trains
While we lived in Germany, I attended a small university in Berlin, forcing me to navigate the train system alone with my weak German language skills. I was scared the first time I rode the train alone. When I reached Berlin, I found the kiosk to buy a ticket, but the instructions were in German. Back then, you didn’t need a ticket to enter the station. It was an honor system kind of thing. I rode the tram for free for a few weeks because I didn’t know how to buy a ticket. I stopped the day I saw two I-won’t-accept-your-sob-story policemen on the train.
My travels brought experiences galore. I sat on a train that stopped in the middle of a field for an hour without knowing why because the updates were spoken in German only. I arrived late to school after one such train ride to find that the professor held the class for me even though he had no idea how late I would be or whether I would even show up.
There was the Montas Pass (monthly pass) incident. A German friend bought me a monthly train pass reserved for German residents, and the conductor on my return trip from Berlin had a conniption fit because I was breaking the rules. Over and over, he yelled, “Blah, blah, blah, nein (no), Monats Pass. Blah, blah, blah, nein, Monats Pass.” I was happy the man sharing my car could translate, and thankfully, I was not kicked off the train in God knows where in the middle of the night.
A Big Mistake
One night, I was late getting to the train station from class. The tram and the train share a platform at Berlin Hauptbahnhof. As the tram pulled into the station, I saw my Dresden-bound train sitting on the tracks. I was freaking out because I was afraid of either having to wait for hours on a dark, lonely platform for the next train or getting stuck in Berlin all night alone.
In Berlin, young Berliners pry the tram doors open as it pulls into the station and gracefully step off, taking a quick step or two and then walking away. Today, I know any attempt on my part to replicate this kind of maneuver would go very poorly, but I was younger then.
In desperation, I pried the doors apart and stepped off. It is worth mentioning at this point that this practice looks deceptively easy. Apparently, there is a certain time when it is safe to step off the train, a sweet spot, shall we say. I did not step off at that time. I stepped off far too soon. I missed the mark.
I slide about 30 feet in a Superman position in white jeans, flat on my face. No one, but no one, asked me if I was okay. I guess they thought if I was stupid enough to try it, I deserved what I got, and maybe I did. I cried for two hours on the ride back to Dresden.
If I hadn’t been at the main terminal, the one joining the Tram and the Train, the platform would have been narrower. I might have slid face down onto the tracks to my death, or into a train on the other side of the platform to my death, or into a brick wall to my death. While I want to go out in an odd, funny way, like getting eaten by a whale and spit out the blow hole while sailing, a death my daughter does not find the least bit funny, dying from jumping out of a moving train seems dumb, not even Darwin awards dumb, just stupid.