‘Can I help you?’ I asked the girl.
She was wandering around the kitchen, tentatively looking for something, holding a mysterious box nestled in a plastic bag out in front of her. She looked Asian, maybe Korean.
‘I look for...erm…wash this…with holes in.’
She proffered the plastic box towards me. Ah! They were strawberries. Big, juicy-looking ones. Yum! I understood she wanted something like a colander. I’d only just arrived that evening too, but I searched the hostel kitchen and found a steamer section of a saucepan. That had the holes she was after in it. That could work.
‘Oh, sank you!’ she said in stilted English. The myth that everyone around the world speaks fluent English is clearly just that, a myth. As I am naturally extremely curious, on further enquiry (using my all-time favourite question: ‘Where are you from?’), I found out that she was Taiwanese.
I sat down opposite her with my quick-cook spinach and ricotta-stuffed pasta, which I had bought from the supermarket on the way from the bus station. I had an Aero chocolate mousse for afters.
‘Is that all you’re having?’ I asked her.
‘I not hungry,’ she told me.
‘Oh, I see,’ I said, although not eating a proper meal at dinner time is incomprehensible to someone like me, who is always hungry.
It turned out she spoke less English than I’d originally thought. Hmm, conversation would be challenging. Not one to give up easily, especially when I had so many questions, it transpired that she was a software engineer living in Berlin.
Fantastisch! We could continue the conversation auf Deutsch.
We spoke about many things over that dinner. Well, over my dinner and her fruity snack. Not least, the reason for her not asking for help in the kitchen when she couldn’t find something. It seemed perfectly reasonable that she wouldn’t know where things were, as she was a recent arrival and would need help. I can be like a Spanish inquisitor when there’s a matter I want to understand.
‘I just assume people are busy or won’t want to be bothered with me,’ she told me timidly, in German that was way more fluent than her English. Really?! I was surprised. I explained how I took the opposite tack and just assumed that if I had a question, everyone would be delighted to help me.
For instance, later that evening, I searched the kitchen for a pen to label the plastic box of leftover pasta I couldn’t manage. I couldn’t see one, so I asked a fwammy. As I expected, I had a friendly response. The location of a tub of pens was pointed out to me, and I was able to label my box with my name and date of arrival, exactly as the poster on the wall had instructed me to, so there was no danger of my leftovers festering in the fridge for months after I departed from Edinburgh.
I told her about how I travelled in my youth with ‘kein Handy’ – no mobile phone.
She recoiled, her jaw dropped to the floor, and she whispered in horror, ‘What?... No Google maps?!!’
‘Nope!’ I said with a grin, and it was a much more fun and exciting ‘abenteuer’ for it. That means adventure, by the way.
We spoke about the difference between then and now and how people in hostels used to sit and chat, rather than sitting in silence, glued nervously to their phones, unpractised and uncomfortable with spontaneous conversation. If I’d seen her the next morning, I would have given her my address and told her to come and visit me in Inverness if she came to Scotland again.
Instead, at breakfast the following day, I met a new fwammy, a nice French lady who was a careers adviser. I got to practise my French on her, but she was also in the UK to practise her English, so we swapped words. She gave me ‘gouffre’, which I guessed meant an enormous hole, a pit, and the associated verb ‘engouffrer’. I gave her ‘posh’, ‘top notch’ and threw in ‘another notch in the bedpost’ for good measure. I did manage to swap contact details with her. Maybe she’ll come and visit me some time, so we can swap a few more words. Maybe I can visit her in Bordeaux.
And then there was my cute, Dutch, headphone-loving bedfellow. Well, my under-bunk buddy, to be more precise. We first met, bleary-eyed at 5 am, when he handed me back my metal water bottle that had fallen from my top bunk like a missile and almost hit him on the head on its way to the floor in the middle of the night.
Once he’d taken his headphones off, we shared many laughs as well as serious ideas and experiences over the three-quid breakfast that the hostel provided, availing ourselves of many free coffee refills. It was a brilliant deal, considering how much I managed to stuff down my gullet, gorging myself on cereal, toast, fruit, croissants, yoghurt and lashings of the most enormous vat of chocolate spread I’ve ever seen. Possibly the management may have to reconsider the price if they have many more guests as gluttonous as I am!
We spoke in English, as all I can say in Dutch is ‘ik hou van je’, as I had a Dutch boyfriend for a while in my youth. It means ‘I love you’. Luckily, my Dutch fwammy didn’t get any wrong ideas from me telling him that. That was good, as it would have upset my boyfriend, who was patiently awaiting my return in Inverness.
On the last morning of my weekend stay, I met fwammies from Granada in Spain, worried about their impending car hire and having to drive a la izquierda (on the left), as we do in the UK. And three lovely fwammies from Brazil, who also spoke German, not English, as they were working as Krankenschwestern in an Altersheim in Baden-Württemburg, (nurses in a retirement home).
I enjoyed a full quota of meeting fwammies that weekend. A ‘fwammy’ is what I used to call a stranger. When travelling around the world before settling down to have a family, I’ve most often found strangers to be incredibly kind, friendly and helpful. That’s why I’ve renamed them ‘Friends We Haven’t Met Yet’. As I’m a linguist, I’ve made the ‘h’ silent and for ease of pronunciation, added an ‘a’.
So next time you meet a stranger, think of them as a ‘fwammy’. You never know what manner of abenteuer you might have together with your new friend…or where in the world your friendship will lead you.
So, go on, I dare you. Find a fwammy, look them right in the eye, beam your brightest smile in their general direction and ask them my favourite question:
‘Hello, where are you from?’