Part Two: Language Barriers

So, another week down in the big city.  They say that living abroad tends to lead to culture shock, particularly if you go to a new country that requires that you get used to not only their culture and customs but a new language as well. I assumed that going into an English-speaking country with a 20-year background in--you know, English--would save me from a lot of that.  It's too bad that I forgot that the Irony Fairy loves this kind of situation.

My internship, located above a men's salon (Ted's Grooming Room), consists entirely of four employees plus me.  They are all wonderful and well-traveled individuals who each speak a minimum of two languages fluently.  Two are Italian, and all of them speak Spanish.  What this means is that both get tossed around the office pretty frequently, but they found out that I'm a Spanish minor this week but can't speak it at all, so they've been trying to help me out by speaking Spanish to me on breaks as little mini-exercises.  We get coffee from the cafe downstairs, and the owners are from South America.  They, being good sports, also speak Spanish to me.  This means that, in my decision to go to the UK and not Spain for the added bonus of knowing the language ahead of time, I merely made the Irony Fairy throw back his head in laughter before placing me in an entirely Spanish-speaking workplace.  I get to practice more speaking every day than in the last four years of Spanish class.

 I do not yet know how to say, "you guys mostly I do not understand any of what you are saying and cannot respond," but that is moving closer to the top of my priority list daily.

I smile and nod a lot.

  Similar: I discovered on Friday, the first day of my informatics class that the term "informatics" here and in the states mean two very different things. I was nervous ahead of time because Informatics is a discipline that is still small enough that the community is international, and you will occasionally pull the teacher who has English as a recent second language and this can create some communication problems.  My professor was incredibly well spoken and I was relieved--and then the Irony Fairy reared its ugly head.  We got down to the subject matter.

Our first exercise was to write three boolean functions that would complete the network as indicated.  Boolean functions? Math?  What kind of a place is this?  I had no idea what he was talking about and it became very clear very fast that every other student in the room did.  I sat for fifty minutes trying to look busy with my "boolean functions" (mostly meaningless algebraic scribbles, plus a kitty) before walking out at the end completely horrified.

My view is that if I had wanted a mathematically intense discipline I would have gone for a CS degree, but it occurred to me afterward that this University only has an Informatics department.  Informatics IS computer science here.  Informatics is CS?  Oh, how simple one-word terminology differences can lead to terrible mistakes.  Kind of like how you should never, ever call anyone or anything over here "fancy pants."

On a lighter note, thanks to that class conflicting with a scheduled trip outside of London, I'm the only one at my flat this weekend.  If the language barriers weren't exciting enough, I still am noticing culture shock in unusual places.

I went to Harrod's today, and everything was so expensive and beautiful that I just wandered aimlessly from room to room, agog, like a total hillbilly.  This is basically how my day went:

But mister, where I'm from, we don't have no shoes made from chocolate...you're lucky if you're shoes ain't made out of dirt and newspaper clippings!

So many surprises in small places.  It's funny to think that most of the culture gaps I'm overcoming were gaps unseen.  I guess though, that's really how most things in life work.  I guess the Irony Fairy wouldn't have it any other way.

Nope.