Schwierige Situationen

So Saturday night my friend Daniel (from Starbucks) invited me to his birthday bbq along Zurichsee. Nice little pool house and lake access, complete with beautiful views of the lake and alps. We went for a quick swim early in the evening before enjoying some Sangria and grilled meat, and a nice night of conversation. There were about 10-15 people there, all very nice friends of Daniel from various places in and around Zurich. The fun part of the night, was the fact that of his 15+ friends, only one was a native English-speaker (a huge guy named Joel from the West Indies, who recently finished his career in NFL Europe, playing linebacker for the Barcelona Dragons and the team from Frankfurt, Germany). So the other guests, while all fluent in English, were carrying on their conversations in mostly Swiss German and High German, with a little Italian mixed in for good measure. Well, after my 2nd or 3rd Sangria, I decided to give my German a whirl, and I started chatting up one of the partygoers. Tasha was a Zurich native, and she was very nice in conversing with me in high German, helping me out a bit along the way. After the first conversation (in all German), I gained a ton of confidence, and got into a conversation with a nice guy named Fabian, who came from the Italian region of Switzerland, known as Ticino. Fabian was very friendly and very patient (with my German), and we ended up having a 45 minute conversation about jobs, politics, the environment and various other topics, totally in German. What a rush! Now, my German has been steadily improving over the past few months, but this was the first time I was immersed in all German speakers, and to my surprise, I was able to not only keep my head above water, but I was having some decently meaningful conversations! After a few more one-on-one conversations, I jumped into a group conversation about living in Switzerland. This proved to be much more difficult, as the pace of the conversation picked up, and the different dialects and accents became tough to decipher. Probably caught every other word in the conversation, but it was still a great experience. By 10:00pm, my head hurt from concentrating and translating for almost 4 hours (surly, the fruity drinks had nothing to do with my headache). I headed home having gained a few new friends and a newfound confidence in my second language skills.