The Tale of Escaping from a German Grocery Store via Chocolate Chickens
Each year, the end of the semester and beginning of the Christmas season brings three things: an insatiable desire to travel after barricading myself in my apartment to finish final projects, beautiful Instagram posts of festive-Europe, and Facebook advertisements for discount plane tickets. It's a perfect storm of stir-crazy and wanderlust that compels me to research trips that I know I won't have time to take or the money to afford. So instead, let's reminisce with a tale from a 2016 European adventure with my fiancé, Ryan. This is the story of the chocolate chickens that saved us:
During the spring of my junior year of college, I studied abroad in Oxford, England. Since traveling between countries in Europe is so cheap, I planned a trip over spring break that included London, Paris, and two cities in Germany. My then-boyfriend, Ryan, bought his ticket across the pond, and soon we were boarding a small plane from London’s Stansted Airport, headed for the town of Dortmund, Germany.
At the time, Ryan was learning how to speak German through the app Duolingo. He was able to say conversational phrases, perhaps on par with a middle school understanding of the language. I, however, spoke only a handful of phrases in German, having mastered French and promptly given up on other foreign languages. These phrases included the very helpful “sprechen sie Deutsch” (Do you speak German?), “sprechen sie Französisch” (Do you speak French?), and “danke” (Thank you). My German was bad enough that waiters heard me butcher one word and immediately spoke English back or hurried over with an English version of the menu.
Despite these language barriers, by our last day in Dortmund, we still had not run into much trouble communicating with the locals—or at least that was the case until we realized that we needed an ATM. I only had about 2 euros left and was worried that we would need cash for the zoo, where we were headed. Now, Dortmund is not a very international city. It doesn't have a huge downtown where all the activities are clustered, or signs in English and German to indicate where landmarks are for linguistically-challenged tourists. The zoo was an hour's walk from our hotel (who knows why we didn't take the train), and this was through quiet suburbs and literally across highways.
So here we were in the middle of Dortmund's suburbs, not a Starbucks with free wifi in sight and two useless phones with no international plans in our hands. Me, trying to be smart, suggested we try a grocery store I saw down the street. I'd been living in England for a few months and had discovered there that almost every Tesco or Sainsbury's had an ATM in it or outside it. Surely, the same would apply to Germany, I reasoned.
As soon as the doors shut behind us, I knew something was wrong. This was a small supermarket (think about one quarter of the size of a neighborhood Walmart). It only took a quick scan of the area around the entrance to see that there was no ATM to be found. We turned around to leave, in a hurry to continue our search elsewhere, but that was when we realized it: the entrance doors didn’t open from the inside. The only way out was to walk through the checkout lines (physically walking around people who were in line, as the empty lanes were blocked) to the exit doors on the other side of a small barrier.
“Let’s just go past these people,” Ryan said, glancing at the milling crowds of German shoppers.
“We’ll look like we’re shoplifting, and it’s not like we can explain our situation,” I responded, imagining Ryan trying to explain that we were just stupid American tourists in his middle-school German. “I’m not going to German jail. Let's find something cheap to buy to get out of here.”
We only had two euros to spend, so we spent an inordinate amount of time looking for one tiny thing to buy (probably making us look sketchier than just leaving). We finally found something that fit the bill: a bag of hollow chocolate chickens, or Schokoladenhühner. We got behind a sweet German couple, who took one look at our tiny bag of chocolate poultry and told us (I assume—it sounded like gibberish to me) to go ahead of them. Luckily, hand gestures transcend language barriers, and we took the cue to go to front of the line.
“Guten tag,” the plump German woman behind the register said to Ryan as he approached. She had round red cheeks and short blonde hair. I’d been immersed in the language so wholly that I now recognized the phrase “good afternoon.”
“Danke,” Ryan answered her, flustered. I wanted to die from vicarious embarrassment at his reply, as if he was saying, thank you for wanting me to have a good afternoon. However, Ryan quickly recovered from his floundering and, in a feat beyond logical reason, managed to ask the woman where the nearest ATM was in understandable German. In fact, she didn’t even have the characteristic eyes-squinted, brows-raised look of disgust that often told us we were butchering their language.
At the time, my heart was pounding, and I was so nervous and focused on escaping the grocery store, that I didn't notice Ryan had pulled out his offline Google Translate app while walking through the store to figure out how to ask for directions (He claims he "only needed to know how to say nearby," but take that as you will). Not having seen this, in the moment I thought he was the most impressive language-learner on the planet.
The woman gave us directions to (of all places!) a bank up the road to find an ATM. We managed to find the bank without getting lost, thanks to Ryan's understanding of the German directions. And for the rest of the trip, we joked about the chocolate chickens that had saved us and the hilarity of that statement out of context.
Bonus: Here are some pictures from Dortmund!
