(this is a text-heavy post for now, sorry - I’ll be adding photos later! ~MC)

Trust is what you call the gut-feeling of expectation-that-isn’t-an-expectation of honesty, reliability, and it flows both ways.

Trust is going under the scissors and straightrazor of a stranger who doesn’t speak either of the languages you do, and believing that they’ll do right by you.

Misverständnis is, literally, misunderstanding - often from intrinsic cultural or lifestyle differences.

Misverständnis is - through a series of unfortunate coincidence and well-intentioned mistakes - leading your host family to believe you want nothing to do with them.

More on that later.

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This week was Unterricht, as usual, but on Thursday we presented our first group project: Einwanderung in der Vergangenheit - Immigration in the past.

For this project, our class was split into two groups - one covering the United States of America, and the other covering Germany, split 6/8 - I was in the second.

The end product (this round, anyway) was a presentation between 15-20 minutes long, with some room for creative flexibility. Our group produced a mock class covering the subject material; it came together within the last 48 hours, despite having about two weeks (but only about 4.5hrs in-class) to complete it.

The presentations for both groups were entirely in German, based on research from written-in-German sources.

I suspect that this was the main reason for the surprising amount of effort that went into producing the content, but for our group in particular (which has a majority of the class’ less-experienced speakers) involved a bit of coordinating.

It’s a good thing we had a good leader in Cameron, who took initiative when most others in the group were hesitant to make waves. She split up the work, decisively determined how the project would be organized, and adopted the most public speaking role (in our case, the instructor).

The presentation went well - feedback was entirely positive, in spite of a minor hiccup

- <!– If you recall those sharp photos from before, they were taken by the talented Fabienne, with whom I’ve struck a deal: in exchange for continued access to photos, I’ll help her put together a personal website.

Given the quality of her work, I think it’s a fair (or perhaps favorable!) agreement. –> -

On Friday, two significant things happened: I got a haircut and had an awkward-but-productive conversation with my host family.

After a bit of a long day in class on Friday, I was feeling like I needed a change - so I went on a walk in the city to look for a haircutter.

I started on Yelp, and chose a haircutter with good reviews and a short walk away. No dice! Despite their hours of operation, they were closed.

The search continued.

Lo and behold, the second choice was also closed! It was feeling a bit like there wasn’t going to be a haircut, which is a bit odd; Saarbrücken is (according to my guest family) known for having a surplus of haircutters.

Fortune struck: as I was walking toward the the train station, I came across this Friseur Casablanca.

Inside were quite a few people who had styles similar to what I wanted - both getting their hair cut and doing the actual cutting & styling.

So I went in.

…and here’s where the trust comes in: of the 6 haircutters present, only one spoke German; and the one who was able to speak did the translating between the man cutting my hair and me (eventually, we agreed to charades-as-communication, which was a bit less frustrating than the language barrier).

I conveyed, as best I could, the concept of “short on the sides, scissors on the top, faded, with a hard part.”

He did a remarkably good job.

And then he pulled out a straight razor (!) to clean up the hard part; he then began to shave/shape/style my beard.

If you haven’t had a shave with a straight razor before, it’s a bit like having someone shave you by holding a knife to your throat and carefully scraping the surface layer off. If they make a mistake, you’ll both be in an uncomfortably red, sticky situation.

And again, he did a remarkably good job - the resulting look was sharp.

Also, it got a bit colder.

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Returning home on Friday evening, things were a bit awkward.

My guest mother began by asking, “did they talk to you at school today?”

“No?”, I answered.

And so it came out: because I had left without seeing anyone else (I depart between 6:45a and 7:05a) and went straight to my room upon returning home (having a fried brain from speaking and learning German for 8 hours straight), they drew a reasonable conclusion:

If our exchange student has suddenly stopped talking with us (for 4 days in a row!) and is effectively invisible and unreachable, it’s probably because he wants nothing to do with us!

(there’s more to it than just that, as I understand it - but those smaller things were not such a big deal; it was the disappearance and lack of interaction that triggered the concern.)

…and it made them uncomfortable, in their own home. Yikes; awkward; oops.

This impression was never my intent, to say the least, and I’m disappointed that this is the impression I made. From their point of view, it was hard to see why their exchange student would just ghost them; they were, respectfully, not knocking on the door to my room to see if that was actually what I intended to do.

and so: because we were both trying to be polite, and because there is a bit of a lifestyle mismatch (they were integrating me into their family, while I was trying to be a guest that didn’t create extra work for my gracious hosts), we had a misunderstanding. Thankfully, after a thorough conversation covering what happened in the last week, we reached an understanding.

We’ll see how things turn out next week - rumor has it we’ll be finding out more about our final placements (in terms of location, university, and so forth).