A couple of weeks ago I was in the Arabic-speaking Palestinian city of Ramallah. I had ridden the bus and spoken to people in Arabic on the way there, but when I hailed a taxi I got in and started speaking to the driver in Chinese! That was awkward.
Another time I was crossing the separation wall to get into Ramallah. I wasn't sure where to go, so I asked these women (in Arabic) if they knew where the bus was to go to Ramallah. They just stared at me, uncomprehending, and one of them finally said (in Arabic) "Arabic. We speak Arabic." "I'm speaking Arabic!" I said back. I knew my Arabic was intelligible, but they just weren't expecting this white girl with red hair to speak to them in Arabic and so they thought I was speaking English or something!
Sometimes it is hard for me to know what language to speak to people: Hebrew, Arabic. Most of the time it is quite obvious, but sometimes I can't tell the nationality of the person before I start speaking to them! Like the other day when I was going to my kickboxing class. I couldn't figure out how to lock the locker (turns out you had to insert a 10-shekel coin), so I asked these girls walking by in Hebrew if they spoke English, and then asked if they knew how to lock the locker (in English). Then they turned to each other and started speaking in Arabic! "I know how to ask that in Arabic!" I wanted to shout, but I didn't. They didn't know how to lock the locker, either, so I guess it didn't matter what language I asked them in!
Another day I was on the other campus of Hebrew University (I take classes on the Mount Scopus campus, but I had to go to the Givat Ram campus, on the other side of the city and right next to where I live right now) to do some research in the library there. I asked a man in Hebrew for how to get to the library, and he walked with me there to show me the way. We exchanged small talk in Hebrew, but I was really struggling to keep pretending like I was understanding what he was saying. Suddenly, we passed someone right as we got to the library complex and the man giving me directions started talking to the other man in Arabic! "You speak Arabic?!" I asked (in Arabic), now aware that he was Arab-Israeli. "I speak much Arabic much better than I speak Hebrew!" I said, thinking of how it would have been so much less awkward for me if we had been speaking in Arabic.
A few days ago I went hiking in the forest near Jerusalem with another grad student. We knew that the hiking trails were right next to the parking lot of the Ein Kerem Hadassah hospital, but we had no idea which parking lot! So we started asking around--but couldn't seem to find anyone that spoke English. I do speak a little Hebrew, but I am always missing vital words in the conversation. For example, in asking someone where the hiking trails are, I can say, "Excuse me, do you know where the ..... is?" but unfortunately I don't know how to say hiking or trail. Yeah. Doesn't do me much good. (This happens to me in almost every conversation in Hebrew. I am missing those key verbs and nouns...which I guess is motivation for me to study harder!) Anyway, I asked one security guard (in Hebrew) if he spoke English, and he said (in Hebrew) "No." When I looked disappointed and was about to walk away, he said, "Don't worry, I speak great Hebrew! What do you need?"
Great. Him speaking great Hebrew did little for the fact that my own Hebrew skills are so minimal! My friend and I tried to explain that we wanted to go hiking. "We want to...travel...near the hospital," we said, trying to make motions like we were hiking. "You want to walk around the hospital? Why?!" he asked. "Go ahead and walk around it!"
I walked up to another security guard and asked him (in Hebrew), "Do you speak English?"
"No," he answered in Arabic.
"Oh! Do you speak Arabic?"
"No," he answered in English.
Utterly confused at this point, I just stumbled through another hand-motioning game of showing that we wanted to hike. Luckily, he knew where the trail was, and we were on our way.
And one final story: since I have to take a level test for Arabic at the end of October, much of my free time is spent studying Arabic and re-memorizing vocabulary. The bus is the perfect place to do this, but I get some strange looks from a lot of people (yes, there is a lot of discrimination in Israel between Jews and Arabs. Shocking, I know.)
I was on the bus studying a list of vocabulary words when suddenly the man next to me said (in English--he was from America but I think had moved to Israel), "You're studying Arabic?!!!" with a look of slight disgust on his face. "Yep," I answered. "Ugh," he said. "It's such a...guttural language."
Yes, well, maybe I like studying guttural languages! It's prejudice like this that inspires me to work even harder at becoming proficient at both languages. And maybe, just maybe, one day people won't have such strong feelings of disgust about either a people or their language!
And just because blog posts are always better with pictures, I'll leave you with this one.
I love awkward stories! Thanks for sharing. :)
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