Freedom

In the States I had a few classes of American history. In one of these classes we tried to untangle the discourse of freedom. We trudged through centuries of American history, pages upon pages, and observed the manipulation and transformation of the concept of freedom. In the end I knew that freedom is something that has been defined and redefined over and over again, but its exact shape remained elusive.

Of all the places, I had to travel all to way to Germany to have a fleeting idea of what freedom means. I might have cracked The Pursuit of Happiness as well. The Germans call it Fahrrad. In English, this intellectual concept translates roughly into bicycle. And I speak of no conceptual bicycle, I really mean a regular bike. You know, with gears, brakes, pedals and a handlebar. The simple mechanical wonder.

As with many important aspects of life, I didn’t realize what freedom was until I lost it. Until this week, I have been able to borrow a bicycle from the hotel and make trips in the stunning German landscapes on stunning German bicycle paths, where the journey definitely is as important as the destination. This week I was suddenly told that I couldn’t get a bike on my day off. That it is the high season and that the bikes are for the guests, who pay money for them. I returned in the afternoon, but there still wasn’t a single bike for me. I tried the following day, to no avail. Except this time, instead of stiff politeness, I was regarded with irritation, like I was a fly that got in and made it hard for the employees to concentrate on their work. Maybe I’d land on a guest’s piece of cake too.

At the time, they, like me, probably didn’t realize that getting a bicycle on my day off means a lot to me. The difference is that I grasped this fact as soon as I was swatted off three times in a row, while they still didn’t realize. They had just taken my freedom away. Instead of writing the UN and informing them that my basic human rights had be disregarded and junked, I managed to get a bike for the day from the sister hotel.

Oh the smile on my breeze-caressed face when I rode down the road in the middle of fields of not-quite-gold-yet. 

Languages

dier·ha·ge·nisch, Adj

 

An adjective created by a Finnish language student. Derived from the proper noun Dierhagen, which is “a municipality in the Vorpommern-Rügen district, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, Germany” (Wikipedia). The adjective is used to describe life in a small German village by the sea – and to display the nerdiness of the author of this blog.

You could also argue, as undoubtedly quite a few Germans would, that dierhagenisch means nothing. It’s made up, it’s nonsense. In my defense, I could argue that most of what my colleagues and other people around here say is also nonsense. Curiously enough, this rebuttal would most likely be denied by Germans. 

I’m beginning to cope better with the spoken everyday German now, after almost a month in a sink-or-swim environment. These days I usually need to ask “Excuse me, could you please repeat what you just said?” only once after each instruction or remark. And if I still don’t get it, I smile and nod. This approach has worked quite well so far. Yet, like with most things, the beginning was far from easy.

To begin with, my colleagues are an international lot, so they know how to be incomprehensible in various languages: Czech, Russian, Polish, and of course, German. Not being able to follow discussions in most of the languages spoken at our coffee table doesn’t really bother me, but I have been slightly frustrated with not being able to make out what people say when they speak German. I learned German for eight years in school and I’ve studied the language as my minor subject at the university for some time now. What else can you ask for? Sometimes I get the feeling that I should be doing better than I am. I should be participating more, instead of only having a vague idea of what the topic is. But then again, it’s easy to think that spoken, everyday language is simple. Yet, it’s actually quite far from it. It can be rapid, blurred or inarticulate. Or all of those at once. All the early mornings in German class didn’t quite prepare me for this. Yes, I learned structures, I learned bits of various aspects of grammar, and I learned vocabulary. And no doubt there were aims regarding spoken communication as well, but like I said, I was unprepared nonetheless. 

At this point I could let this entry become a rant about language teaching and the shadow of the matriculation examination, and ultimately a discussion of what language is. I spare you from that for now. Instead, let’s end on a positive note. 

I was just thinking back to the day when I made up my mind to study German. It was around the change of the millennium. Due to group size requirements there wasn’t going to be a German language group in my school. I was bummed out. I didn’t feel like waking up early to bike to another school a couple of mornings every week, while my classmates slept in their comfortable beds. No way. Yet, my teacher sensed my uncertainty and urged me to think about, sleep on it. Can’t remember to what extent I discussed this dilemma with my parents, but in the morning I decided I was going to start learning German nevertheless. Now, a decade later, I’m pretty happy to have the opportunity to spend a summer in this idyllic environment and manage my everyday life in German. Losing a few hours of morning sleep wasn’t such a bad price for all the opportunities I now have.

Introduction

Dierhag…what? Is that a bird, is that a word, is that German? To be perfectly honest, I could say that about most of the stuff that flies around at the housekeeping coffee table, deep down in the basement of hotel Fischland.

Hold on. First this Dierhagenisch monster of a word, and now something fishy about basements. Right. How did I end up sitting confused in a hotel basement in the first place? To begin with, let’s just say it’s not the first time. I have been in the hotel housekeeping business for the past couple of summers and it seems that there is a tendency to shove the kindly housekeepers in the dark basements and out of sight. This summer I wanted to do something different. Break out of the box. Break the box. After a fair chunk of time brushing up my language proficiency, googling, perfecting resumes and firing off summer job applications, I succeeded. 

So now I sit in a German basement occupied by a bunch of housekeeping ladies. 

Maybe not as grand as you were hoping for, but it’s still enough to confuse me. To make me feel giddy. To make me feel uncomfortable. To make feel both out of place and at the right place. 

I’m about to ditch this talk about feelings for moment and set the record straight. For the summer of 2013, I, Mika Tompuri, work in the housekeeping department of Strandhotel Fischland, a fairly big German hotel by the Baltic Sea. The four-star superior holiday resort is conveniently located in the North-German seaside landscape dotted by small idyllic villages, which seem to exist only for the summer. To breathe summer and gently to shake tourists out of their holiday money, and make a run for it when the seasons change. In all honesty, that sounds awfully lot like what I’m doing here - except that my lungs aren’t all that big, I only get tiny trickles of the currency flow, and I don’t run all that fast. 

Finally, I know it’s already nearing the end of June and that it has taken me a while to get this small writing project started. And I know there are tons of exciting blogs about clothes and cats out there, but I thought it’d be nice to have place to collect and organize my thoughts. And, let’s not lie, it’d be even nicer if there was someone out there to listen to my ramblings. So friends, welcome to this journey through a summer in Germany. 

So, was this Dierhagenisch monster actually a bird or a word?

And yes, I intend to end my first post with such a cheap way of building up suspense.