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Mind you Language


“Gayyst du?”

It seemed to have been directed at me. I slowed down to take a note of where it was coming from. There on the side sat a young German lady with her bag, looking directly at me.

“Huh?”

“Gehst du?”.

I had never seen her before and I was convinced that I was not in the league which convinced a woman that she should start a conversation with me. If then, the only possibility was that she probably knows me. I desperately tried to recall when while trying to make sense of connecting what she was saying with some distant memory.

“Wie bitte?”.

“GEHST DU?”

“Are you going?”. Yes that was it! But to where? And why? Fuck, did I know her? The confusion spread all over my face.

“Are you leaving?”, she stammered seeing that her attempts were going nowhere.

Oh, leaving. Not going. that was it. She just wanted to know if I was leaving so that she could take the locker that I was going to empty. Half embarrassed, I directed her towards my locker that I emptied. As I stuffed my charger and laptop into my backpack, it hit me how just 5 minutes earlier I had been brimming with confidence at having understood most of a news section on a German TV channel. Then this lady has brought me crashing down to Earth just by using a very elementary word in a context I did not understand.

“Still need to work on my German”, I said as a parting statement to the new owner of the locker.

“Oh that is ok”, she replied sympathetically.

9 months. Still a long way to go.

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