Fiona is 19 months old now and just starting to talk. She has her own cell phone to play with. It doesn't work any more, but she can dial it and have one-sided, unintelligible conversations with Grandma. I am not sure whether she's pretending to call her American Grandma or her German Oma, since it's not always clear whether she's speaking in English or in German, or just in baby talk.
Fiona's chatter made me think about my own love/hate relationship with the phone since we moved to Germany. When we first moved here, I became very afraid of the telephone. Whenever possible, I would avoid making calls. If it rang, I froze. Talking on the phone in a foreign language is way way harder than talking face-to-face. There is nothing to point at, no fingers to count on, nowhere to draw a picture, no way to give my helpless foreigner's smile and shrug that might keep the German-speaker from hating me. Getting a friend to call for me is a little demeaning, but I had to do it in the beginning. A few times I called Deutsche Bank myself, only to be told that no one was able to talk to me in English. At one of the biggest banks in the world. Really. But I have no right to be angry; I am living in Deutschland and it's their bank.
I wasn't afraid of the phone all the time. That's where the love part of the love-hate relationship comes in. One of the best things we did in those crazy few months of moving our lives across the ocean was to get a land line for the first time in years, and to sign up for a cheap international calling plan. Now we can pick up the phone and call home. It's a real one with buttons, not Skype or video chat. Second only to the internet, that phone plan has allowed us stay in touch with friends and family in the U.S.
A lot of those family and friends have Face Time and Whatsapp and all those things that people with smart phones have. Brian and I have dumb phones. When we moved here we got really cheap prepaid cell phones. We are not gadget people, we are certainly afraid of having to decipher a phone contract in German, and we didn't need it that much - there were only a handful of people who might call. Now, three and a half years later, there are two handfuls of people who might call. We still have the dumb phones. About a year ago I started to order pizza over the phone. I realized this week - after I had called the hair salon, the doctor's office, the Deutsche Bahn, the airline and also the pizza place - that I wasn't afraid any more.
After a couple years of pretending, just like Fiona with her toy phone, I could communicate without holding up any fingers or smiling. And just like Fiona, I can call my Grandma on the phone. We always talk in English.
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