Another Cross-Cultural Moment

Thing One's high school soccer team this year included (very unusually) not one, but TWO German exchange students.  One sophomore from Hamburg, one junior from Hannover.  Given how much I have said over the years about the rural nature of this area, you can likely imagine the culture shock that two boys from city-center Germany are having here.  The one, who happens to be living with the family of a friend of mine, at least has three host siblings, and their house is in a neighborhood.  The other is living on a sheep farm with no other kids!  Apparently these kids were assigned to families all over the country by their exchange program and where they ended up was to some extent a matter of luck.

Karl, the kid from Hannover, ended up in carpools with me frequently because his host mother, the mother of another player from the team and I are all friends and live in the same area.  We joke that we carpool in self-defense, since between us we have nine very active children between the ages of 11 and 17!  Karl is a really nice kid, and although his English is heavily accented, it 's excellent.  In all the hours he's spent in my car overall, we've only run into one standard English word he couldn't remember, and as a consequence Thing One and I now know that the German word for "kite" literally translates as "air dragon."  

Not surprisingly, though, we do have the odd communication breakdown when figurative speech and slang get involved.  Having studied two foreign languages in school myself, both Chinese and German, I have been on the other end of that many times.  Sometimes you just have to know what something means, because it doesn't translate literally.  My high school Mandarin teacher explained to us once that if someone calls you a rotten turtle egg, it is the rough equivalent of being called an SOB in English.  Who knew?  I remember at one point having to explain the meaning of the word "hick" to Karl, and when somebody told him to put the biscuit in the basket (meaning to shoot the soccer ball into the goal) he was totally befuddled.  Unsurprisingly.  

So, with this as background, you can understand why I was a bit taken aback at the grocery store yesterday.  All I wanted to do was buy the kid a 17th birthday card, but I hadn't realized until then just how many teen-appropriate birthday cards rely on either figures of speech or language-based puns for their humor!   I took pictures of a few examples.  Pictures 1-2 and 4-5 are the front and inside views of the same cards, FYI.  

 

You couldn't blame the kid for looking at any one of these and going, "Huh??"  I finally found another one with humor that would translate across the language divide and bought that instead.

I'm glad he's here.  I'm deeply impressed that he had the nerve to leave everything familiar to him and expand his horizons, and I'm grateful that my son has learned something about Germany from him and also made a good friend in the process.  It's a step toward making the big world a tiny bit smaller, for both of them.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!  Wishing you a happy day with your friends and loved ones.