My Greatest Journey: My Awkward Exchange in Germany in High School

Hera Lindsay Bird in her Bildungsroman.

I would never have gone to Germany if it weren’t for the bee sting.

In elementary school, I belonged to the evil quartet of girls. It seems inaccurate to call them friends. They looked more like colleagues in a large, open-plan primary school office. I can’t remember what we talked about or what we had in common. But I remember being unceremoniously dumped after being stung by a bee on the Thames South School pitch and making a scene in front of the boys. This humiliating sight was the last straw for my friends, who handed me a handwritten note terminating my contract.

I was stunned. Not so much a refusal as a surprise. I spent two lunches in the library mulling over my options. The idea of ​​continuing through school without friends was impractical, so I scoured the playground, selected a likely candidate, and began to win her over through a tactical combination of prolonged eye contact and a purposeful smile. Miraculously it worked.

My new friend’s name was Ilana. She came from a German family, and we got along like a house on fire. We listened to audiobooks about shipwrecks and pranks, and called the Nesquik consumer hotline. I married her dog Ronye in an elaborate backyard ceremony. I was fascinated not only by my new friend, but also by her extended family. She lived with her mother and German grandmother in a small cottage overrun with chickens. They drank gallons of Chi mineral water and bickered amiably in this harsh environment. Teutonic way Germans have. We spent many long summer days waging war against the white butterflies that had devastated her grandmother’s cabbage.

When I moved to another city, we lost contact. But my passion for the German people remains. It was this friendship that prompted me to take German lessons, which was not available at my school. I signed up for a correspondence course and was allowed to rent a dark room in the school basement to rewind and rewind tapes. Möchtest du ins Kino gehen? Ich habe, du hast, wir haben.

I can’t remember how this exchange happened, only that it was oddly informal. A German couple whose daughter wanted to study in New Zealand proposed a child exchange. Although this initial arrangement failed, the German school that facilitated it found a replacement for me. My parents were doubtful. Fourteen years old seemed too young. But I was confident that I could handle it. I was supposed to come to Cologne in August 2002 and stay there for six months.

To save money, I took a job in the deli department of the Handalla supermarket, handing out precise 100-gram handfuls of ham to wealthy pensioners. I was told I needed to learn to ride a bike, and my dad took me on long, wobbly practice rides along Red Rocks Beach. There was a farewell party where I was given a poonamu necklace blessed by my extended family. It was hard to say goodbye, and I cried on a long flight over the Pacific Ocean while listening to “Bic Runga Beautiful Collision” on my record player.

The ideal foreign exchange candidate is personable and enterprising, with enough charisma to overcome the language barrier. I was none of those things. It’s funny to look back now and think what the poor Germans must have done about me. I was shy and stern, with waist-length blond hair. I wore weird unflattering kilts and blue snakeskin flares, although the TV show The Tribe was popular in Germany at the time, so maybe they thought that’s how everyone dressed in New Zealand.

My hosts were a middle-class, single-parent family. They generously agreed to take the stranger in because they had a daughter my age and they hoped we could become lifelong friends. Big mistake. Elian was a talented athlete who slept on a bed shaped like a cow and had hair that was known at home as “minced cheese.” From the moment we met, it became clear that we had nothing to say to each other. Elian and her best friend Catherine made a sincere effort to include me in their friendship. But I was secretive and awkward, and I was bored and alienated by their easy kindness. Even then I knew it was a character flaw. But I would have struggled even without the added complexity of the German language.

We attended the local Gesamtschule, a drab co-ed high school with a large running track and a huge mural of a mouse eating a strawberry painted on the cafeteria wall. All the teenagers wore brown pants and listened to Bon Jovi. The girls towered over the boys, who looked several years younger. Perhaps all the cigarettes stunted their growth. Everyone over the age of 10 smoked because cigarettes were easily available from street vending machines.

Several other students invited me to their parties. But I didn’t want to make friends. I already had a lot of friends at home to whom I liked to write long and pretentious emails. What I really wanted was to be a pair of eyes sailing through the world.

This proved difficult because I was a minor in a foreign country. The people responsible for my well-being probably considered me mentally unstable and did not want to let me out of their sight. I think I upset and confused my German host family, who couldn’t understand this strange teenage girl who only wanted to eat luxury European caramels and ride the train in silence. But in my own way I was completely happy. The many minor humiliations and awkward social obligations were more than compensated for by the secret purpose of my trip: to walk around and look at things.

I walked everywhere. I filled my eyes to the brim. I walked through Cologne Cathedral while street musicians in the square below played Simon and Garfunkel pipes. I attended a family wedding in Austria where an old man taught me how to waltz by moonlight. I went to a German McDonald’s and bought a hamburger. I was walking through an art gallery in the city center. I don’t remember a single painting I saw there, but I do remember being greatly moved by the exquisite pathos of the tourist shop that sold beautiful tartan umbrellas. I remember looking into illuminated store windows, blinded by the rain, and feeling completely electrified by the beauty of the world. For me it was better than a thousand Klimts.

I was supposed to stay for six months, but ended up only lasting five. I think Christmas killed me. We spent the Weihnachtstag in someone’s grandparents’ house, in a basement that smelled of nursing home disinfectants and secret grudges. There were raisins in the roast, and the homesickness I’d been struggling with suddenly seemed unbearable. I called my mom and exchanged my return tickets for an earlier flight home.

It was snowing the day I left. It was like a consolation prize. My host family gave me a warm send-off, and they were no doubt extremely relieved to see my back.

Anyone who has ever traveled knows that the best part of leaving is coming back changed, with an indescribable sense of international sophistication. As soon as my feet touched New Zealand soil, I traded my waist-length hair for a black pixie cut and returned to high school feeling worldly and peppy like a young Marlene Dietrich.

For many years I thought my trip to Germany was a failure. I didn’t get anything that could be gained from a cultural exchange. I didn’t have any lifelong friends and I didn’t develop a passion for language. But I returned with a deep and abiding sense of belonging to the world. Some invisible threshold was crossed, and I felt human in a way I had never felt before. Like the naive hero of the Bildungsroman, I went to seek my fortune and returned mysteriously changed. My German is still bad. I could probably ask for directions to the Berlin post office at gunpoint. But the most important words in any language are always the same. Hello. Please. No. Sorry. Thank you. Yes. Goodbye.