#i too would read everything in my journal to the male equivalent to a girl failure

[sfsolstice]

Anaïs Nin, in a letter to Henry Miller d. Feb. 22, 1932, in A Literate Passion: Letters of Anaïs Nin & Henry Miller, 1932-1953

[memorylang]

Meeting My Mongol Host Family | #40 | July 2020

As the second of my summer 2019 throwback trilogy, this time I detail experiences in rural Mongolia. As with my first summer throwback, these events took place in between summer adventures I’d shared last year. You can dive straight into the new stuff or read the past stories here: first weeks in Mongolia, comparisons to previous travels in Asia, my 22nd birthday and a trip to the capital and day-in-the-life moments. 

Ceremonial Greetings for Foreigners in Mongolia

By my second week of June 2019, I've moved in with a Mongolian host family. We live in northern-central Mongolia’s Номгон /Nomgon/, a tiny town, home to only 2200 people. The town sits on one side of a two-lane paved road linking provinces. Across the road stands a fairly lone mountain, also named Номгон. Women aren’t to climb it, which is common for more sacred mountains. A large expanse of idyllic alternating crop fields spread between the road and the mountain, which has a Soviet train track before it. 

Besides the picturesque fields, rails and peak visible in the distance, my town’s main feature is its box-shaped two-story school building. I think Soviets built it when they partially developed this area in the 1970s, but it’s painted lime green now. My fellow few Peace Corps Trainees in this town and I spend most of our days at school. 

I spend extra time around our school, too, since my host parents work there. In fact, I first met them at school. When my fellow Trainees and I first arrived, we experienced ceremonial greetings with our host parents. 

The sunny Saturday, June 8, my training cluster mates and I disembark our compact yellow bus to a small concrete area in front of the school. Here we find identically costumed children of all ages performing in unison for us. Mongolian families stand around the perimeter, watching. As our Resource Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV) would explain to us, Mongolian events always begin first with a series of song and dance performances.

The children dress in bright-colored traditional outfits. During one performance, a group in yellow with cyan play traditional stringed instruments. In another performance, dancers in seemingly pink with white for girls and green with white for boys perform moves reminiscent of traditional activities in Mongolia’s nomadic culture. After the performances, we hear a welcome speech from the school director (Mongolia’s equivalent of a principal). Then we follow inside our Resource PCV and a Mongolian we’ll later learn is one of our teachers. 

My peers and I take seats at desk benches around the left edge of the room, with wide windows to our backs. Before us sit little bowls of candies and ааруул /ahh-roll/, lightly sweetened dairy-based nibbles. We’d learned just days before  within Peace Corps culture sessions that these are common treats with Mongolian hospitality. 

One by one, my peers and I get called to the front of a classroom for individual ceremonies introducing us to our host parents. Many host parents are young, around their mid-30s, which often sets us Trainees only about 10 to 15 years apart from them. My host folks are a tad older, though. 

I step up to the front and greet mine. They’re in their late 40s, though their skin looks more worn than I'd have expected. They present me with a long blue scarf of possible silk (called a хадаг /hah-dahg/), along with a bowl of fermented mare’s milk. The sour mare’s milk is called айраг /ai-rahg/, with its ‘ai’ part sounding like ‘apple.’ 

Anyway, I’m a klutz, so I spill the айраг on the хадаг. Thankfully, my host parents are humorous, kind and loving. They forgive my blunder, we get a photo, and I seat again. Afterward, outside, we heave my luggage from the Peace Corps bus to their car. On a bumpy ride in under five minutes, my host mom swerves between potholes to reach my host family’s tiny house. 

My Mongol Host Family, June 2019

Peace Corps counties vary in how they arrange housing and training. In Peace Corps Mongolia, we stay with a host family for three months in a rural part of the country before transferring to our two-year site, which is either rural slightly urban. There we live alone during our service. Some Trainees spend their host family summer in a Mongolian ger, others get a room in a house, and still others get a sort of shack on a host family’s property. I got a living room that had a lockable door, which makes it count as a Peace Corps room. My bed was a long couch. This is quite normal and lovely. 

Although in English, I’d be the host son of my host family, in Mongolian, I’m the American son of my Монгол /Mongol/ family. So I’ll just call my host parents my Mongol parents instead. Dad translates to “аав” /ahhv/ while Mom is “ээж” /ehhj/. 

My Mongol аав /ahhv/ is rather thin and shorter than me. He works as the local school's жижүүр /jee-JURE/. Translated as "steward," his job crosses between watchman, desk attendant and handyman. I see him some mornings on my way past his simple desk while walking to my language classroom. 

My Mongol ээж /ehhj/ is a much stronger and bigger person than my Mongol аав. She teaches elementary school students. She's one of the few people in town to own a vehicle, so on rainy days she sometimes drives me to school, letting me skip my five-minute walk. 

Like many vehicles in Mongolia, though, this one’s a fairly compact one from Korea. Opposite of America, the driver's seat is on the right side of the car. Despite this difference, drivers in Mongolia still drive on their roads’ right sides. Again, this is fairly common. 

Besides my host parents, I also have host siblings. Younger siblings, regardless of gender, translate to “дүү” /dew/ in Mongolian. We also call both our younger host cousins and other younger children we address, “дүү” /dew/. To identify genders, we use Mongolian’s equivalent of “male дүү” and “female дүү.” Neat! 

Anyway, within my host family, I have a rebellious 20-year-old male дүү and a mysterious 17-year-old female дүү. The teenage sister darts from sight my first weekend here. But, with Google Translate’s help, my college-aged brother explains she’s really shy. I hope she’ll open up. I also have a Mongol cousin I assume is somewhere between 11 and 12 years old. This дүү is energetic like me and ostensibly fearless, so he takes me on adventures before his return the city, mid-summer. 

Rad Culture Quirks, June 2019

My energetic дүү came to greet my Peace Corps neighbor and me on our walk home from our first day of school. Along the way, my дүү kept making this neck slit motion with his finger, all excited. I felt perplexed. 

Moments after I get home, I learn my host family’s brought a live goat or lamb to be cooked this evening for the ceremonial meal. Those intestines sure take getting used to, but I persevere. I later learn from my local teachers that my host family felt ecstatic that I tried everything! 

As weeks go by, my cohort peers and I get used to seeing the occasional animal skulls and severed hooves in the dirt our walks around town. I find these less exciting than the time we saw, from our Peace Corps bus windows, a herder in the grassy hills guide animals by offroading a Prius. Usually, we’ll see herders riding motorcycles or simply horses when they’re not on foot. Mere days before, an American Peace Corps Mongolia staff member warned us we’d witness Mongolians with a Prius do things we’d never seen. 

Anyway, the bus rides were just for transit between cities. For much of our training, we stick to our towns. 

In town, among the first features I notice is the abundance of teeny brownish birds that hop about then move like a cloud. My host mom calls them something like ‘bolchimer.’ But, Googling “бөлчимэр шуувууд” gets me nowhere. Perhaps they’re Eurasian wrens. I often see them during mornings while praying my rosaries. 

My host family and local teachers really respect my time for spiritual practices. These help center me amid changing conditions. Often, when locals ask what I do in my free time, I say I pray and journal. Indeed, I often keep a rosary on me during the day. My host family started assuming if I was alone in my room, I was probably praying. That felt nice. 

A Chinese-American in Mongolia

After Mongolians learn a bit about me, they tend to regard me as an Asian-American, who just happens to speak Chinese, to have been to China and to have family there. 

I notice a slight disconnect about me being ethnically Chinese. Evidently, I don’t look too obviously one ethnicity or another. I later read that Mongolians had traditionally held nationality solely in terms of the father’s side. In that sense, I’d be entirely American. 

I also share photos from an album I’ve filled of my American and Chinese families, close friends, student life and travels. Every photo including a friend who’s female and Asian, they take her to be my girlfriend. Alas, I’m not that special. 

To avoid possibly problematic situations, though, I only discuss my ethnicity, religion and politics when locals ask. (They really want Andrew Yang to win the election.) That said, since I mention I’m Catholic, some Mongolians would me ask about Biblical stories, usually from a literary standpoint. I’m happy to oblige. Though, I'm often more curious about Mongolian practices, such as the respecting of stone pile shrines I see atop mountains. I love learning from locals.

At last, I’ve a few stories to share from host family life and the countryside! Hopefully, you get some laughs and clearer ideas of how I spent my summer with limited internet. It felt quite memorable! Prepare for the outdoors. 

The Boy on His Horse, June 2019

Before I left the States, my thesis mentor said Mongols are very resourceful and resilient. Peace Corps staff told us, as Volunteers, we must be likewise. 

On the last day of June, my host family had taken me on a weekend trip to the countryside, where they introduced me to family friends who live in white dome-shaped gers (yurts) as herders. As we drove to leave, though, our car got stuck in the marshy mud. We tried using a large, firm log we found to push the car up. That broke the branch, but I found it a worthy effort. 

After a while, my host parents sent me and my teenage sister to wait elsewhere while they spent the remaining sunlight to haul their car out with help from strong locals. 

Nearing the third hour since we got stuck, my host sister and I were walking back across the marshes near sunset. As we walked, a younger Mongolia boy on his horse was chatting with my дүү. His family had been helping ours dig out the car. 

I didn’t understand most of their conversation until the boy on his horse asked where I'm from. My host sister and I replied America. He seemed surprised I spoke Mongolian, so I said my usual qualifier, "жоохон жоохон" /jaaw-hawn/ (only a little). 

Then then boy asked my host sister whether I was something like, "Хятад-Америк хүн" /Hyatad-Amerik hoon/. I hadn’t heard this phrase before. It seemed to me something like “Chinese-American.” 

My дүү shook her head and replied she didn't know. I felt confused. For three weeks, we’d known each other. Shouldn’t she know? I wondered, maybe she was just covering for me. After all, many Mongolians despise Chinese people. Peace Corps generally advises us not to bring up being Chinese. But, my day felt long, and I didn’t feel like hiding. 

So I smiled to the boy and replied, "Тийм" /teem/, I am. 

And the boy on his horse didn’t seem too surprised. I felt relieved. A local had for the first time recognized my mixed ancestry on sight—And no harm came. 

During late July, my Mongol ээж /ehhj/ would explain to me that her relatives had lived in China (the Inner Mongolia region, I believe). That day, we shared stories about our families’ lives in Mongolia’s neighbor nation. I had a great host family. 

How to Bathe Without Running Water, Summer 2019

By late June and into July, I've grown used to bathing with my түмпэн /tomb-pen/ (washbasin). Here are the steps.

First, my host family or I start by boiling water with the electric kettle in the kitchen/dining area. We take one of many identical plastic stools and set my түмпэн basin on top. I’m usually set-up on the linoleum hallway floor serving as our house’s entryway. From here, I fill my түмпэн /tomb-pen/ basin with three or four pans of cold water from our family's barrel we cart refills into each week. 

By the time I’ve finished filling my түмпэн /tomb-pen/ with cold water, I've usually set my orange bar of soap, yellow shampoo bottle and blue hand towel beside me, on top of my host family’s semi-automatic washing machine. They used to have me practice outdoors, but nowadays they have me wash inside. 

Next, I take the water kettle off its heater and pour about three-fourths of its contents into my түмпэн. This cuts the cold water, making it go from frigid to warm. Then I retrieve a little cold water from the barrel for my rinse pan and pour in boiled water from the kettle to make the rinse pan warm, too. 

Next, bathing! I take off my shirt and glasses, bend down to dip my hair in the water to soak it, and cup water to splash over my arms. I lean over my түмпэн the whole time. Next, I squirt shampoo between my fingers, rub that around my hair, behind my ears and all around my neck. Then, I take the bar of soap between my hands and lather that down and up my back, up and down my arms, plus across my chest and my face. Afterward, I take my rinse pan and pour the warm water over me before drying off with my little towel. I used to be very bad at rinsing all the shampoo out. 

Shirt and glasses back on, I remove my түмпэн basin from the seat, set the basin on the ground, then I sit in the seat. Up next, I set my legs one-at-a-time into the түмпэн. I soak, lather, rinse and repeat. This part reminds me of Catholic Holy Week services when we wash each other's feet. I dry off again, dump out my түмпэн in the yard, move my cleaning things back to my room, then I’m done! The cycle repeats about three times a week. 

Capital Adventures, July 2019

During my cohort’s train trip to the capital around my birthday, I experience my second encounter with someone who suspects I’m Chinese. 

While aboard the overnight train, I was wearing my Chinese cultural shirt with the 漢 Hàn character on it, from my summer before in China. My Peace Corps peers and I were walking down the car to reach our beds. A child seemed surprised when my fellow Trainees explained I'm American, not Chinese—Neat experience. 

Unrelated to ancestry, I also enjoyed borrowing a few books from Peace Corps Mongolia’s lending library. These help me learn more about Mongolia’s vast geography. The one region I didn’t look into was a more urban place that I figured wasn’t on the table for our potential assignments. 

Besides borrowing books, I also got to hug Peace Corps staff again! That’s always a pleasure. I really missed hugs. Later that month, we celebrated with a cake to commemorate July birthdays like mine! 

And lastly from the capital adventure, my peers and I explored a Tibetan Buddhist monastery. Its iconography looked a bit too gory and sensual for me. Later with my host family in July, I saw a Buddhist statue in Дархан /Darhan/, the nearest major city, and found that one tamer. 

All things considered, my first capital adventures went well! 

Language Oasis, July 2019

Long before I felt integrated into the rural community where I trained and taught during the summer, I hadn’t realized how starved I’d felt from not speaking Chinese. Here’s a wholesome story. 

Since I came to Mongolia being originally considered for Peace Corps China, I spoke Chinese. But I worried—I heard many Mongolians dislike Chinese people. I’d probably few opportunities to speak the language. So, I focused strictly on trying to figure out Mongolian. 

At one of many dusks during July, my second month in Mongolia, I was playing volleyball with my primary and secondary students on our basketball court, while my host sister talked to her friends. We usually saw the same kids every night. But this night was different. 

One of my high school students, who speaks the best English, approached me with someone new. My student said her friend studies in Darkhan, which was why the girl hasn’t attended lessons I teach with my fellow Peace Corps Trainees. But, her friend studies Chinese. 

I had the most unbelievable conversation! 

I suddenly spoke Chinese again, with my student’s friend. But, I juggled Chinese with occasional Mongolian words, since they were top-of-mind the past two months. Then, when my student would speak, I responded to her in English. To the young children gathering around, I spoke Mongolian. (They asked if I was speaking Japanese, haha.) Wow! 

As for what we talked about, the Chinese-learning friend asked what I thought of Mongolia and the children. Mongolians usually ask me these. But, her Chinese skills surpassed many Mongolians' English. I felt relieved to speak my truest joys to a Mongolian who understood my words. I love feeling understood. 

The sun fell fast, for time flew. My host sister approached, handing back my language notebook and jacket, signaling time to head home. My student and her friend left with an elated trilingual farewell. 

I hadn’t seen those students since the summer. But, I never forgot their kindness. 

When Peace Corps Mongolia staff requested we Trainees write our placement preferences, I declared my interest in interest in using my Chinese skills, too, to serve Mongolians. The joy I felt being able to engage with that half of myself, I realized, could profoundly sustain me. 

Chinese Food and Mongolia, July 2019

Fake news tends to circulate Mongolian media about Chinese poisoning food and products sent to Mongolia. While there’s possibly truth to some claims, many feel reminiscent of fake stories spread across Facebook in the U.S. about Russia. Still, some moments in Mongolia reminded me of China with twists. 

My host family had taken me to Darhan to visit one of their friends and have delicious homemade soup dumplings with them. Then, they left me alone for a while. I noticed on the toothpicks label Chinese characters of my Chinese family's home province 湖南省。But, when I mentioned it, the Mongolians around me insisted it was Korean or Japanese. That felt weird. 

On a brighter note, sometimes simply the way I eat carries more Chinese tendencies than I once thought. For example, my Mongolian host family usually asks me to mix my food when I have a plate of many things. But since my Chinese studies abroad, I’ve usually kept things separate, as Chinese tend to. Mongolians also seem pretty surprised whenever I order hot water at restaurants, rather than either tea or cold water. Hot water, again, is more a Chinese thing. 

Mongolians even use the Western standard of forks and knives. They have sliced bread, in addition to rice and noodles. When Mongolians taught me the Mongolian word for chopsticks, they added that these are used by Chinese, Japanese and Korean people, not Mongols. 

The cultural quirks aren't problems for me, just observations. I figure most of these had Soviet influences. Food notions were among my last reflections about China during my 2019 summer in Mongolia’s countryside. 

Trials of Nature’s Commode, Summer 2019

This last story’s more for the gag, but it’s a Peace Corps staple experience. Welcome to the outhouse, among the first of many Peace Corps challenges. Luckily, I'd never lost a shoe or a phone like some people!  

Let’s zoom back to the morning. I’ve risen from the couch in my host family’s locked living room where I sleep. Unlocking my door and unlatching our house’s wooden front door, I’ve stepped outside into the pre-dawn morn. Thankfully, I've avoided the guard dog and crossed the yard to the outhouse. 

Most days, I simply knock on the outhouse’s metal door first. Then I open it to let the birds shoot out. (They used to spook me the first few times.) Then I enter. It's a long, long way down. At night, I cannot see the bottom. Over this towering chasm is but a plank. There is no chair. I stand aboard the plank while closing the door. The door doesn't lock, of course. If it's windy, I balance holding the door closed by its handle. It's only blown open once, but luckily no one was near!

Then I, as one would expect, remove the undergarments, assume a proper squat and try to take care of business. Thighs aching, I then rise from the business, toss my waste paper in a bucket to my left, return my undergarments, shove open the door (which often gets jammed), then I begin the journey back to the house, avoiding the dog and sometimes geese. Inside, I use our water dispenser to wash my hands—again, since we lack running water. But, it’s all doable. 

This routine gets complicated on mornings after rain, since the outhouse gets bugs crawling around. One morning, I saw both a daddy-long-legs and a centipede! At least the door stays closed better after rain since the frame’s made of wood. 

Of course, there are exceptions. Many Mongolian yards lack doors to the outhouses. Some places lack outhouses entirely. In those cases, we just use sand in the woods. Privacy is overrated, maybe. Just cover your tracks, and you're fine. Good times. 

Coming Soon: Language Today and August Throwback!

Woohoo! You made it through the wild times. 

I have one more summer 2019 throwback story queued, featuring host family farewells and Peace Corps Mongolia Swear-In experiences. Prior to these, I’ll catch you up on another round of how I’m faring amid COVID-19 in the States. I’m pleased to announce an exciting project! 

Till then, August 9 marks the birthday of my late mother. I’ll be reflecting as usual. Take care, friend!

If you’d like more from last summer starting out in Mongolia, see these:

Summer’s Peace Corps Training Months 1 through 3 | May, June, July, August

My First Days in Peace Corps Mongolia | #37 | June 2020

Refresh Abroad as Student and Teacher | #1 | June 2019

Meeting My Mongol Host Family | #40 | July 2020

Horses and Global Adventures | #2 | July 2019

22nd Birthday! Наадам, City and Countryside | #3 | July 2019

Typical Day in the Training Life | #4 | August 2019

Farewells for 2019 Summer’s End | #41 | August 2020

As always, you can read from me here at DanielLang.me :)

[timhowe-blog1]

~ Being British in Bavaria ~

                                               Prologue

  ‘So, let's just get this straight,’ begins Frau Gürtelmann, removing her spectacles and fixing me slap bang in the eyes with a studied, concentrated gaze.

‘In your application you said that you are PC literate, but it turns out you can't touch-type, you can't tell the difference between pdf and power point, and Frau Bichlbächer had to show you how to send her an email’.         

That much is true. I had needed to ask her secretary how to send an email. It seems incredible that a means of communication which we take for granted nowadays was by no means bread-and-butter business back in 1998.       

‘All you're able to do,’ continues Gürtelmann, ‘is open Word’.Looking for confirmation, lest she might have misidentified my true colours, she cocks her head: ‘Right so?’

I’d been tickled pink when, having just graduated the previous autumn, Deutsche Telekom instantly offered me a full-time position in its translating department. My first day on the job looked promising. I’d always considered myself to be a natural talent at journalism, and was delighted to be asked to translate press releases for the company’s English-language website. The first assignment involved a dispatch advertising a wake-up call service from glamour girl Verona Feldbusch. That’s roughly the German equivalent of Katie Price. As I handed my polished text to the department secretary I remarked ‘Gosh, and there are people prepared to pay good money for something like that’.

This off-hand remark must have found its way back to the boss, because the following morning I was removed from press translation and relegated to manning ‘the clippings cubicle’. This, I soon discovered, was the least popular duty in the whole department – one normally assigned to school pupils on work week. My instructions were to ‘fillet’ the daily Fachpresse, or specialist press, cut out everything to do with telecommunications and glue it into a scrapbook. I’d heard from former novices that new full-time entrants were also occasionally put to work on this peripheral assignment. But for just a day or two, before being moved on to more key, translation-based tasks. Apart from being released to translate the odd text whenever a colleague went sick, I remained in the newspaper clippings cubicle a whole month.

I should have taken the hint. Especially when the colleague responsible for keeping an eye on my efforts quietly handed me the Stellenangebote – situations vacant – from the Süddeutsche Zeitung and suggested I might start applying for other jobs.  Things hadn't quite panned out as planned, it seemed. I was now being called into the boss's office for my first and, as it soon transpired, only progress report. And we weren’t even a third of the way into probationary period.

Frau Gürtelmann's damning appraisal of my practically non-existent PC skills is, alas, spot on. Humiliated and unable to return her gaze, I lower my eyes, bringing them to rest on a stain on the lacquered wood floorboards. Then, as if attempting to mitigate charges being brought against me, I look up and whimper ‘Yes, but I also copy and paste’.

On reflection, I'd possibly taken ‘PC literate’, buzzword of the time, rather too literally. I was, after all, literate and able to turn on a PC. Surely that sufficed, did it not? A simplistic but nonetheless reasonable line of thought in the days when social networking meant little more than writing out a cheque each year for Friends Reunited and mobile phones came bricklike, glued to a 12-inch antenna. As for connectivity and the Internet of Things, back in 1998 these were foreign words to me.

In my defence, I ought to explain that my ignorance of all things IT was not totally mea culpa. I am one of the so-called ‘lost generation’. The very year after I left school, Information Technology was introduced to the National Curriculum. The idea of ‘catching up’ on this essential life-skills subject was never mooted, however. Right through university and well into my first full-time teaching job in Britain it was not once suggested that a basic grasp of PC knowhow might possibly enhance my career prospects. Not even when I took my Diploma of Translating shortly before the Millennium was there any talk of computer literacy being de rigueur for those wishing to progress in this IT-driven profession. As a mature student, I was easily ten years older than most of my fellow peers – every single one of them PC literate, naturally.                                              

Following the dressing down in Frau Gürtelmann’s office, I knuckle down at my laptop and endeavour to fix my shortcomings in the IT department. For starters, I take an Introduction to Word course at the local VHS, part of Germany’s excellent adult education network. I even buy an old typewriter for ten marks and teach myself touch-typing. Still, having made a dog’s dinner of my first job in Germany, probably the most sensible thing to do would right now would be to cut my losses and return to England. Although my first attempt at teaching in Britain hadn’t exactly been a crowning achievement, I probably should consider giving it another go. They’re desperately short of foreign language teachers in Britain, I speak French and German fluently and am appropriately qualified. I feel sure I could make a much better job of it second time round.

So why am I reluctant to return to Britain? More to the point, why am I so gung-ho on staying on here and making Germany my home? Twenty years later, and this is still one of the most frequent questions which Germans ask me. ‘Wie kommst Du hierher?’ They want to know what brought me here. This has always struck me as something of a strange question. I mean, why not ‘Lust auf Lovely Germany?’ That’s the title of a recent Spiegel magazine report on intra-EU migrants. It’s no accident that some 96,000 Brits currently live in Germany. The country enjoys a healthy economy, plenty jobs, a generous health and social care system and generally a much better climate than Britain. They brew a damn good beer here too, of course. These are typical reasons I give whenever Germans ask me how I ended up here. And they’re all part of the reason why I’m so happy to make this country my adopted home. What originally attracted me over here all those years ago, however, takes a little more explaining. Truth told, I fell in love with Germany quite by accident. And it was all thanks to a teenage magazine called Bravo.

Flashback to the early eighties. Growing up in the genteel Georgian city of Bath in Northeast Somerset, it’s unlikely that I would ever have become quite so fixated with Germany and the Germans, had it not been for Bravo. I discovered this popular youth magazine on an exchange trip to our partner town of Brunswick in 1982. It was the year that Deutsche Welle rocked not only the German charts. Splashed over the mag’s front page almost every week were names like Spider Murphy Gang, Hubert Kah and Trio. The latter even made it onto Top of the Pops in Britain.

Emailing, text messaging, WotsApping – none of all that had been invented back then. I don’t think we even had fax. Which is why letter writing, just shortly behind the telephone, was probably the most common form of communication between young people. And Bravo, like most youth magazines of the time, played a pivotal role in this process. I decided to write off to its pen pal page. Scribbled on the back of a blank postcard and accompanied by a simple black-and-white passport photo, my text read Engländer (18) sucht nette deutsche Brieffreunde/innen (Englishman seeks nice German penfriends, male or female). 

I didn’t give the request a moment’s more thought until several weeks later when the postman rang our doorbell excitedly waving a fistful of letters from Germany and Austria. The senders were all female, aged 15 to 17 – a rather narrow target audience for any type of magazine. Not that this really mattered much to me at the time, of course. I was too busy sniffing scented envelopes, deliberating which one to open first. Up to 900 further letters flooded in over the course of the ensuing months, and for a brief period I even possessed my own sorting bag at the local town post office. I did my uttermost to reply to as many as I could. My sole precondition – acceptance criteria, so to speak – was that they enclose a pretty photo. Or at least promise to send one by return of post. Scented notepaper earned bonus points, sending me onto overdrive, as I fired off responses machine-gun style. If ever there was a schoolboy trailblazer to online dating I can proudly say I helped pioneer the project. And if letter writing was ‘in’ then I was right there at the cutting edge.

It soon transpired that this was a perhaps less than ideal way to be spending almost every moment of my freetime in my final year of school. And scribbling away in chaotic Denglish was possibly not the best preparation for my German exams either. Miraculously, I scraped through final examinations with a ‘B’ (History) and two ‘C’ grades (French and German). The latter, interestingly, was a very hard school subject in those days, and remains equally so. This might explain my rather disappointing grade in my most favourite subject. Only around 9% of British pupils actually learn German – and most happily abandon the subject by the age of 16. No wonder Brits refer to it as ‘niche’ subject. Whatever educational value I felt might be derived from corresponding with a substantial proportion of the female teenage population in Germany obviously failed to manifest itself in my exam results.

Having written as many letters as I could physically manage each night I would crawl into bed, collapsing alongside my plastic-clad transistor radio. I habitually sent myself to sleep with Berichte von heute, North German Radio's roundup of the day's news. How much I was able to follow invariably depended on the strength of the crackly short-wave signal. Each morning I would awaken to dulcet tones of Radio Luxemburg's Fröhlicher Wecker, aka Axel Fitzke. This slightly less cocky German version of the BBC's Chris Evans invited his Germany-based listeners, and probably his sole follower in the UK, to wallow in a grand pêle-mêle of Deutsche Schlager and Euro pop. The latter – smash hits from Brittany to Bucharest – despite being sung in relatively comprehensible, albeit rather nonsensical English, never seemed to chart in Britain, strangely enough. The line-up included stars with dubious-sounding names such as Gazebo, Secret Service and Joy. Not to be confused, of course, with the somewhat more sophisticated Police and Joy Division, which most of my peers were into back then. But if Germans were unashamed fans of banal euro pop then it was good enough for me too.

In my last year of school I was, needless to say, obsessed with all things German. When classmates were kicking a ball around the playground or, more likely, slouched on sofas in the sixth form centre, my ears would be glued to headphones in the language lab, fervently following the latest episode of BBC Schools' Deutsch für die Oberstufe, which Herr Lawson kindly recorded each week just for me – I seemed to be the only one interested. 

Hence I spent my final school year specialising in the subjects I loved – foreign languages and history. The school careers advice centre, sadly, wasn’t the greatest of help in guiding me on what exactly to do with these subjects after school. Looking back, I should really have gone in for something more career-oriented, such as journalism or tourism management. Unsure what to do next, I was talked into doing a bone-dry, text-bookish Language and Linguistics degree course. I chose the University of Essex for one sole reason – the port of Harwich was just down the road, providing a convenient escape route to Germany. It was a few more years until no-frills airlines were to revolutionise the way we travelled abroad. For the time being it was the ferry for me.

Had you asked me, in those halcyon, pre-Brexit days, if I'd rather be German than British the answer would have been a resounding ‘Jaaaa!

This, then, is the story of my journey from Bath to deepest Lower Bavaria. And in this post-Brexit climate, an attempt to answer perhaps one of the toughest Anglo-German issues:

Can you really transform a Brit into a Bavarian?