I keep catching myself. I’ll be sitting at a table, idly watching the conversation move back and forth, or sitting quietly on a train, zoned out but hearing the words drift by. Suddenly, it occurs to me that the words I’m listening to, the conversation I’m following, isn’t in English.
Perhaps I am used to the extreme opposite when I travel. The complete strangeness of Hangeul (Korean) or Swahili/Shona/Bemba, distant relatives of languages I know a little, with just a few common words. It is disconcerting to find myself in a country where the foreign language is familiar. I don’t speak Dutch by any stretch. I didn’t realise how much I would understand.
It comes in handy. Yesterday, I got to Rotterdam and headed out to take the tram, as per instructions sent by the hostel. There was a schedule posted. The tram I was waiting for was supposed to arrive every 10 minutes. But the sign with the expected times of the trams didn’t show it (yes, there are signs indicating how long you’ll wait, just in case the timetables are ever so slightly off – I imagine there will shortly be a post which is an ode to the awesomeness of Dutch public transport).
After waiting a while, starting at the screen, it occurred to me that I was reading the text scrolling across the bottom. The text indicating that the tram I was anticipating taking was not running on this particular day from this stop. Mentally thanking every Afrikaans teacher I’ve ever had, I headed off to the metro instead, instead of waiting around for ages and ages in the cold.
Inside the metro station, I looked around and couldn’t see a ticket desk with a human. I needed a ticket and there were ticket machines. Except there weren’t, because even the name of the machines was in Dutch. I picked up a ticket and only as I was leaving realised there was an option on the first page to use English instead (when I picked this, out of curiosity, it turned out to be English only to the first page, FYI, for anyone who doesn’t read Afrikaans).
It happened again this morning: I was reading a bilingual brochure for an attraction I wanted to visit and accidentally found myself reading the Dutch instead of the English, which turned out to be more detailed and more accurate.
Usually, I travel with a guidebook. This trip was so last-minute, so unplanned that I didn’t pick one up. Instead, I’m relying on maps and brochures picked up from information desks and hostels. And overwhelmingly in Dutch. Understanding a little makes travel easier. If I can’t immediately understand things, I find I can figure them out. I’m more confident. I can’t speak the language (I don’t generally speak Afrikaans either – just read and understand) but I can generally understand most of it.
There is something else. It’s something I struggle to explain – it’s comfortingly familiar. Perhaps it is the music of the language that is similar to Afrikaans. The voices of teenagers laughing on the square. The quiet conversation of an elderly couple on a bus. Even the people, the “types” feel predictably familiar.
Beyond the familiarity of the Dutch itself, there is a vocabulary of place that is familiar here. More than familiar – it represents a world I learned as a child. It struck me yesterday as I sat on the train from Amsterdam to Rotterdam. Outside the window, along a canal, were houseboats. There was a story, a long time ago, about a mole and a rat and a toad. Was it The Wind in the Willows? In it, there is a river or a canal and a houseboat. The pictures looked like these houses. On a canal. Somewhere in my head, I have held, all these years, a picture of a houseboat and a canal that didn’t match any of the houseboats or bodies of water I would ever see. It existed for me nowhere but the books I read as a child. Yet here it was. I made a note to complement the classics with African books for all the children in my circles and wondered how many other things there are in my mythology of the world that have no substance beyond imagination (for me) because they have never existed in my physical reality.
Like woods. “The woods are lovely, dark and deep…” “If you go down to the woods today…” “They shut the road through the woods seventy years ago…” I could go on and on. There were woods in Narnia, possibly the central book series of my childhood. There were woods in all the Enid Blyton books. There were no woods in South Africa. I’ve seen montane forests with hundred-year-old yellowwoods. I’ve visited the tropical rain-forests of the Congo. I had never walked in the woods until today.
It shouldn’t be possible for language to be both fragile and robust. Over the years other concepts had become attached to those words for me – forests for “woods” and yachts for “houseboats”. But language bounces back. The actual thing fits so much better that it quickly replaces the substituted concept. And those things – the real world things to which words should be anchored – make it possible for reality to translate from the unfamiliarity of Dutch to the gentle, safe familiarity of Afrikaans and, eventually, English.