One chilly Friday evening a few weeks ago I found myself sitting in the middle of fifty British teenagers giving a talk. This was a group of students from my old school, over from Yorkshire on a school trip to Berlin, and my former teacher had asked me to talk to them about what it is like living in Germany. The surprisingly smart hotel (school trips have obviously gone more upmarket) was only a short bike ride away from our flat, and I was happy to oblige. Two of the teachers there had taught me German – one, who also happened to be the mother of one of my best friends, had given me some of my first German lessons and the other had taught me right through to my final school exams at the age of 18. Whilst I have always loved learning German, in those early days I could not have known how significant German would be. Indeed, now nearly twenty years later I have lived in Germany for over nine years, am married to a German man, and have two German-British children. My German teachers have certainly played some part in that.

Though a worthy subject about which I would have plenty to write, this post is not about the importance of language teachers, but instead about the sorts of questions the students asked and what that tells me about expat life. They were instructed by my former and their current teacher to ask me about anything from studying German at school and university to what it was like living here. The questions came thick and fast (they were not a shy group) so I will just write about the most telling few.

One of the first was about when and how I lost my sense of embarrassment speaking German to native German-speakers. This to me seemed a particularly wise question for a fifteen year old — because it requires being aware that the hemmed in feeling you experience when speaking a foreign language does not stem directly from a lack of vocabulary but more from a self-conscious awkwardness which impedes you effectively using the the scant knowledge you have. After all these years speaking German, I had forgotten that when you first learn a language you feel like an actor playing a role on a stage for which you have not had enough time to learn the lines. My advice was to try to ignore your embarrassment, and speak whenever you got the chance, with the logic that the more you practise your lines, the better you can play the part until you feel yourself indistinguishable from the part itself (at least momentarily).

Another student asked what job I do – an obvious but clever question when you think about it. Jobs (even your parents’ jobs) feel unfathomable when you’re still at school. Even the best two-week work experience placement can’t really give you a sense of what it is like to sit in an office, or stand in front of a classroom, or drive a bus every day. My job in the mysterious industry of “digital media” in a foreign country must have seemed utterly alien. Simply hearing what someone (me in this instance) says about what they do when they sit in front of their computer screen or in meetings with colleagues takes you a little bit closer to understanding that far away world.

A third question which struck me at first as rather funny was about how long it took me to get used to the German food. Apparently the food they had been expected to eat in the hotel was “really weird – especially the slimy potatoes” and they just could not imagine eating this day in day out. Having palmed them off with something about how lots of German food could actually be quite yummy, it was only in retrospect that I realised what this question actually revealed about attitudes to food in our globalised world. Most of these students will not be from affluent backgrounds and they may not have travelled much, but when they have travelled with their families the food available to them is what they know from home: MacDonalds, Subway, Starbucks – global food chains which make sure everyone can find the same thing wherever they go. And, this is supplemented by what is perceived to be “foreign food” but is really a cookie-cutter global imitation of specific local cuisines: pizza, Chinese, curry, Mexican. German cuisine has not yet (and perhaps will not) become one of these bland imitations – and unfamiliarity breeds suspicion. Why eat seedy rye bread when the familiar sliced bread is also there? As more of the same is available in more places, we can find less pleasure in the “different”.

From the perspective of these students, expat life is not the norm. Most people they know do not live abroad – whether briefly or for an extended period of time. To them it seems like a rather mysterious thing to decide to do. And I don’t think this is specific to those school kids from Yorkshire but to a much larger spectrum of people out there. It reminds me what a privilege it is to experience a foreign culture so closely and to make some of it – even the slimy potatoes – part of your own.

Chloë