Visiting Stamford Bridge

The path to Stamford Bridge, home to Chelsea Football Club, is easily the creepiest one I've ever taken.

 It required walking through a cemetery. An enormous cemetery. It required a one or two kilometer walk. Through a cemetery. And my friend and I got lost while walking through it. It never seemed to end!

 The graves there were really old. Whoever was buried here mustn't have been dead anymore. It seems they needed some more space, so they broke out.

 We could see the edge of Stamford Bridge about midway through the cemetery, so we knew we were going in the right direction. However, we got lost finding the cemetery gates- and there were only two total. Walking around the cemetery was becoming a little freaky.

 Finally, we found the entrance to Stamford Bridge!

 We got to visit the players' locker room! And all their jerseys were hanging on display! I learned that all the players receive two jerseys per game:  one for wearing and one for trading with the other team. Also, the players are all assigned to lockers next to someone from their home region, if one exists, so they can communicate with each other. Eventually, I guess they learn to speak English a little better.

 We got some really great views of the stadium, too!

Photos taken early July 2013.

Curiosities of Learning and Speaking Foreign Languages

              I recently traveled to Germany and to Lebanon to visit my relatives (summer 2012). In Friedberg, Germany, we visited my dad's cousin Ramzi and his wife Heike for a few days. I spoke no German, none at all. The only words I could say with certainty are "Guten morgen! Bitte! Danke! Ein, Svei, Drei! Frankfurter!" Luckily for me, Ramzi and Heike could speak English with ease. It was evident in Heike's schooling, though, that German schools (or at least the one she attended, many years ago) taught a less idiomatic and more literal translation of English to the students: Heike would say something like, "Once, I have been to Brazil, and while I am at the airport a man is approaching me..." The tenses are uneven—so what? It is easier in other languages to tell stories in the present tense because they do not need to use past participles—and the wording is idiosyncratic, off-kilter, though the meaning she meant to convey was understood. "Once, I went to Brazil, and while I was at the airport a man approached me..." 
              While in Germany, I remained mostly silent, in shopping places, in restaurants, tourist areas, because I did not know enough German to string together a sentence. It is far less embarrassing to not speak to people than to reveal that you are visiting their country have not learned their language. I remember my French teacher telling me that any attempt to communicate in a foreign language is more appreciated than to only speak to someone in the one you know. It shows you have not even tried to learn the other language. In retrospect, I should have tried to use what little German I knew instead of remaining silent.
                 Learning a new language while in a foreign country is like being a feral child. Feral children are children found in the wild, and act like the animals around them. People can bring the feral children into society with success, as the children understand emotion and relate to other human beings on an emotional level, but there is a critical time frame in to the mastery of language must conform. Feral children can learn lots of words throughout their lives, but most are too old to learn the concepts of sentences and grammar at the pace that ordinary children learn (Aplan). Words can just be funny sounds to them rather than specific way to communicate. In this way, I learned many new words—for instance, I can tell you that a hautbahnhof is a train station, a raised rail platform, and kuchen means cake—but I could not use these words in a coherent sentence; I can neither tell nor ask in German how to get to Ramzi and Heike's house from the hautbahnhof, nor would I understand a German response except for the body language that reinforced it.* When you learn a language at such a primitive level, you never learn useful verbs.

               Similarly, speaking with another person in a foreign language, one that you have only practiced in a classroom, is like trying to play a song and realizing that you did not practice enough, because the rest of the orchestra is playing faster than you are and you can only catch one or two notes per measure. The same goes for the ability to hear the nuances of the foreign language that you are speaking. In Lebanon, I tried speaking in French with my cousins Yasmina, Samy, and Ghia. I could hear the words in the sentences the spoke and understood what they meant, but I had to ask them to repeat what they had said because I could not compute as quickly as they spoke except for the last parts of the sentences.
"...-pose?" Asked my cousin Ghia. We were on a family walk, and my cousin Yasmina and I were jogging ahead.

"Quoi?" I responded, not expecting the question and not catching what she had said, though I recognized that it was in French.

"On se repose?" She asked again. 

Oh. She wanted to rest. "Non. Euh, nous allons courir à... à l'arbre là. Tu te repose si tu veux." In a response, it feels easier, to me, to repeat the words from the question because they are your grappling hook, the thing that helps you climb up the wall of the language barrier that keeps you from hearing and understanding what was said the first time.

               I would like to call the following hypothesis the American Traveler's Paradox, though its truth is (very) limited: if an ostensibly American person travels out of the country, the people he encounters will assume that English is the only language he speaks, so that is what they try to speak to him. Conversely, if an ostensibly American person travels out of the country, he will assume that the people he is likely to encounter, such as a hotel clerk or airport customs officer, will speak English. This is what I encountered during my stay in Lebanon. I did not know enough Arabic to carry on a conversation past greetings, but I do know enough French to do so. I told relatives who I noticed speaking French past "bonjour" and "merci"** that I understood French, in French, and they still spoke to me in English. Also, as a corollary to the paradox, if a foreigner comes to the United States, the American will assume that the foreigner speaks English, and will speak English to the foreigner. Of course, there are many more reasons for people wanting to speak to Americans in English, or Americans wanting to speak in English instead of another language that they know (and not all foreigners who come to the US speak English, etc.), that refute this paradox, but it is nonetheless an interesting hypothesis. It is just based on my observations from that vacation.

             On the flight from Frankfurt am Main to Washington, D.C., I sat next to a black woman, African or Carribean I could not decipher. Irrelevant, in any case, where she was from. I smiled and said hello to her, and she returned the nod and a small smile, but not the "hello." She was silent, and I knew from employing the same silence in this kind of case that she did not speak English, or not much beyond "yes," "no," and  "toilets?" She had experienced that same silence as I had, that fear of being perceived as different or inadequate, just being tired of needing help communicating. It can be frustrating and it can make you want to give up any efforts to speak in someone else's tongue.


*If you can't tell, I just recently watched this documentary (July 2012).
**Lebanon was occupied by France before it became an independent nation, so most schools teach the language and many people still use French phrases instead of certain Arabic ones, like merci instead of shokran (شكراً). My cousins speak fluent French, English, and Arabic.

Third and final note: I originally wrote this blog post a year and a half ago, but never published it. I never really finished it, because I didn't think I had addressed counter arguments well enough. I kept the content of this article the same, even though I feel a bit differently about it now than I did at the time. I cited the feral children documentary that I watched, though it now comes from a different source than before. I might write a reflection/response to this post soon! Having traveled a little more and become much more fluent in some foreign languages, I have a different perspective on language than I did before.


Aplan, Rick. "Wild Child: The Story Of Feral Children." YouTube. YouTube, 30 June 2013. Web. 26 Nov. 2013.

E-mail to My Friend: Do I Sound Crazy, Desperate, or ADD?

Hi: a stream of consciousness from me, who hasn't talked to you in a long time and is trying to make this a ridiculously long subject because she can't think of a pun to put in it

Dear Luke,

  HI! I have not talked to you in a long time, and I thought, "oh, we live in the same city, so we will cross paths eventually," but that has not been the case, because, I assume, you referee still on Saturday mornings and I am never in town on Saturday mornings. I had to skip refereeing this season. I had an injury that "benched" me for the rest of the school's cross country season, though technically no one is allowed to "sit" on a "bench" because everyone is running, but I am back running now. School is more difficult, with an endless reading, math is boring and my math teacher doesn't like me because I try to do homework while he is teaching so he changes the homework at the end of class. I still have not the coordination to juggle even one tennis ball properly. Also, I still have not learned Portuguese. 

How are you? What do you do these days? Soccer, I suppose, maybe swimming, and maybe robotics club or something that would somehow blow my mind, like the play I saw this weekend, by a group called "The Baker's Dozen," Anne Frank and Me. I was utterly amazed by how creative my peers are, and how talented they are. They make me want to be an actress, expressive and awe-inspiring; there could be no more powerful feeling in the world than being on stage for the dramatic moment, with the audience, silent, mesmerized, hanging on every word. 

Are you going to the state fair on the 22nd? I am really excited for it, and I know it will be so much fun! You should block your schedule and come. As far as I can tell, Keith is a maybe, and whether you go or not will probably determine whether he does too. Early afternoon, right after lunch is when we meet at the gate; the admission tickets are cheaper at the state fair than at the DC Fair, by two or three dollars! (So they are five or six dollars, depending on if they are pre-ordered or purchased at the gate.) I don't have my after-nines, so if my parents allow me to drive to Rollo and I end up staying later than seven, I probably will spend the night at my grandparents' house. My parents might drive me instead- it's not definite which yet.

I miss our long conversations in the lobby at the residence hall about boy scout adventures and books that never end, or they end at the beginning, and vice-versa; I kind of miss having you gently but somehow ruthlessly beat me at Pente (kind of, because I do not miss the annoying inability to "see the forest through the trees" during the game). I wish I had typed up this email way earlier.

The Magical Gate

This is a photo I took of a gate in the East Side Gallery in Berlin at the end of  March 2011.

My Fear of Appearing Weak

I am worried that I have a stress fracture on my right shin, or worse: a broken leg. I can not walk on it without feeling pain. I ran too hard these past two weeks, and now, as well as before, I am paying for it. I thought at first, "this hurts, but they're just shin splints, they'll go away as I run." They did not go away, and actually became worse. I kind of like the attention of having an injury, but at the same time, it is also immensely embarrassing. I sort of pity those who have injuries, but I don't really care that much. It seems like no big deal, socially, to have a broken leg or stress fracture.
                When I think about it, though, all I can focus on is what I wouldn't be able to do. If I have to get a cast or crutches, I won't be able to drive to school (because I need my right foot), I won't be able to run with the team, and I will not be able to make it to the bathroom and go to class within five minutes. People with injuries don't get special treatment. My left shin hurts plenty, too, but I can still put weight on it. It hurts in the same place that my right shin does. What if my left shin has a stress fracture, too? What if I have two stress fractures, and have to wear a cast on each leg? I can just imagine what would I would look like, the girl with Frankenstein feet, clomping into class like an awkward clown. If it would require a wheelchair, I would be mortified to look and feel so helpless and slow. People would stare at me and think, "oh, look at that girl in the wheelchair, she can't walk or do anything. She might be nice and all, but that wheelchair would hold me back from my other friends."
         I suppose that what I am really afraid of is being held back. I do not want to feel vulnerable and dependent. I desperately wanted to be one of the varsity athletes, but if my legs do not get better, I might not even be able to run until the spring! I feel cut off front my teammates after five days already. (After looking at horrible images of bones that have totally snapped, though, I really hope that nothing is broken.)

I know what the strong person does. She says, "Awe, man! Oh well, I better find a way to make it work." That is what I may have to do.

P.S.- My next post will be more eloquently written.