Können wir Deutsch sprechen? Bitte?

We've just arrived in Frankfurt, Germany's financial capital, where we'll be playing a concert tonight before heading west to Luxembourg tomorrow, and to be perfectly honest, I'm getting a little tired of bus travel. Airports may be a royal pain to get into and out of these days, but there's just something about spending 3 or 4 hours on a bus driving down some anonymous highway that makes you feel like you're wasting your day.

Still, busses it is, for now, and seeing as I got to spend a leisurely day off in Stuttgart yesterday catching up on e-mails, practicing whatever I liked on my viola, and wandering the city's relaxing plazas, I shouldn't be complaining.

Reviews of our various German concerts are steadily trickling in, but unfortunately, they're in German, and we don't have most of them translated yet. Still, if you happen to be multilingual, or just enjoy seeing the words "Minnesota Orchestra" in the middle of a mass of foreign gibberish, you can get your fix here, here, here, and here. My German isn't great, but I can usually understand the gist of most of what I read, and my impression is that we're continuing to rack up (mostly) positive reaction from the press. Certainly, our audiences have been quite appreciative at every hall we've played.

Speaking of language difficulties, one of the aspects of international touring that used to confound me was the way that Germans, in particular, seem able to sense immediately when an English-speaker has wandered into their place of business, even before we open our mouths. Try it sometime - walk into a coffee shop, bar, or food stand in Germany, and just stand at the counter for a moment. I can almost guarantee that, more than 50% of the time, you'll be greeted in English. It's uncanny.

Now, this used to annoy me, partly because I make a point of being as inconspicuous as possible when I'm traveling (in my experience, there's nothing louder on the planet than a group of Americans talking to each other in a non-English-speaking country,) but mostly because I actually do speak some German, and I'm eager for opportunities to practice. Of course, I can still try coming back in German to a barista who's just asked in English what I'd like to order, but it seems sort of pointless, especially since I usually need a moment to absorb whatever has just been said to me in German and construct my answer, and once we've established that everyone else in the joint speaks my language better than I speak theirs, I'm just wasting everyone's time.

I used to take the preemptive English greeting as a sign that Germans assume that all Americans and Brits are monolingual idiots who must be treated like small children, lest we start shouting and threatening to bomb things in frustration. But recently, I've begun to suspect that the English-speakers I encounter here are actually just as eager to demonstrate their linguistic proficiency as I am to test mine. On the occasions that I manage to slip under the Amerikaner Radar and conduct a transaction entirely in German, I rarely get as big a smile or as effusive a "thank you" as I do when I just give in and speak English. (And yes, it's possible that this is because my German is even weaker than I imagine, but I'm really not terribly stretched by placing an order at Starbucks, so I doubt it.)

In any case, my run of being able to communicate even slightly in the local tongue will shortly be coming to an end. While there is German spoken in Luxembourg, French (which I haven't a word of) is dominant, so I plan to follow Sarah around like a puppy dog while we're there. (I'm not sure she's ever mentioned it on the blog, but our Ms. Hicks is actually trilingual, fluent in Japanese, French, and English.) And while Vienna, where we'll wind up the tour, is full of people who claim to be German speakers, I've spent enough time listening to them talk to be fairly confident that they are lying, in much the same way that the Scots are lying when they claim to be speaking English.

By the way, blogging may be light for the next couple of days, because our travel schedule is about to get hectic again, and the prices that hotels on this continent charge for internet access is beyond outrageous, so we're mostly dependant on finding nearby hotspots at cafes, which we won't have time for again until at least Wednesday in Vienna...