After visiting home for a couple of weeks with my hubby (though he had to come back early) I came back to Munich to spend a week with him before he flew off to America for work- for two weeks. Now, me being who I am, I generally don't mind being left alone; I often quite like it. In Grenoble I spent days in my room/ flat without leaving, once even up to 6 and a half days - mainly because I had assignments to do and there was no food shortage so I didn't have reason to go out. Of course Skype and other social media like Whatsapp can be very useful in these moments when people need to contact you and you clearly have no intention of leaving the building (or they're just too far).
However it's been a week since my other half has been gone and while I was quite happy to get on with my own plans and routine for much of the beginning, a couple of days ago I had a sort of emotional crash. I was progressing with a task I had been putting off for months and I thought I was so near completion that when I thought I had finished the majority chunk, I saw that in fact no, I had still quite a lot left. It deflated me and I felt I couldn't possibly finish. To calm down from my panic and just distract myself I went out to the shops for some grocery shopping and then came back to prepare for my English classes.
Friday came and I had my first proper bit of human contact since the last class, since I hadn't really spoken much to anyone since except a few minutes on Skype here and there with a friend or my husband. The conversations were fleeting and of not much importance. I started to re-evaluate my relationship with being alone, because usually I appreciated being alone in contexts where I would still be able to navigate and communicate relatively easily once I went back into "the real world", having had my moment of escape.
Now, while I am pretty used to my environment, the area and the tubes I realise that my outside experience is greatly altered by the simple fact that if someone were to come and speak to me, it would disorient me immensely, especially as I have to shamefacedly just reply with,"English?" A lot of people here do speak English and a German neighbour was surprised that I even considered wanting to learn German since I could function perfectly well without it. But my German learning hasn't really been coming along very well and even to be spontaneously available in any language takes a lot of learning, not just a few weeks of memorising set phrases.
I think of the irony, of seeming like the stereotypical Brit who doesn't bother to learn another language "because everyone else speaks English" or should anyway, when I spent years of my life learning French, only to accidentally land in Germany. I feel ashamed to ask people to speak in English for me but then I hardly have another choice while I'm still just learning odd nouns and phrases in German. I can't go out for a coffee without enduring that shameful scenario.
Moving to France wouldn't solve the problem because while I can speak and understand French, the culture is far less tolerant than in Germany. I feel so much more at home here than I did in France. I feel like people are more open and the supermarkets greatly reflect that, with the range of foods and especially the labelling. In France there's almost no such thing as a 'suitable for vegetarians' sign, whereas our German cousins are extremely tolerant of and accommodate different dietary requirements and choices. I guess you can't have everything...
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