Helen FieldsScience Writer

My measure of success in a foreign language is being able to get through transactions at stores – stores where you have to talk, not supermarkets – without the other person switching to English. I’m achieving this in German, so, three cheers! Example: Today I bought a SIM card for my phone. I told the guy I wanted a SIM card, I told him, no, I didn’t already have a phone number, I said, yes, my American Handy (the german word for cellphone – nice, eh?) will work here, and signed various things, all with him only saying “Thank you” once. Yessss!

It’s a good thing I’m having successes outside of the classroom, because in my intensive German class, I’m kind of a mess. My grammar’s not bad and I think my accent is pretty decent, but my vocabulary is the size of a flea. If I ask for the meaning of a word, I get a definition that uses other words I don’t know. Today we watched a half hour of one of the TV morning shows and everybody else seemed to understand what was going on in the news stories – they could discuss content – and I was the one who the teacher had other people practice their explaining skills on. (“Oriol, can you explain Formula 1 racing to Helen?”)

Oh well, it’s probably good for me to be the laggard in a language class for once in my life. The other students have been here for several weeks already, so it’s not really fair to compare myself to them. And I really do speak quite well (evidence: the SIM card transaction). I just need to expand my vocabulary, and I think two months of living here is going to be very good for that.

Yeah, this is the life. This afternoon after German class and a walking tour of one of the cooler neighborhoods in Berlin, three other Burns fellows and I stopped in at a biergarten. Hey, we were talking about journalism and stuff! It was totally work!

See that bright green drink on the table? Yeah, that’s my drink. I was inspired to get it when I saw a teenager in front of me in line order one. (The drinking age is low here for beer.) It’s a local beer mixed with fruit syrup, which they keep in plastic squirt bottles.

I’d already tried the pink version, which I think is raspberry flavored. The English translation on the menu helpfully told me that the green one is “woodruff”-flavored. Not by her. Apparently it’s an herb. The drink tasted a lot like green sherbet. I think I’m going back to pink next time.

This is the homework assignment I just wrote for tomorrow’s German class:

Die Frau sitzt neben dem Telefon. Sie erwartet einen Anruf. Wann Als sie das Haus verlassen hatverlies, brannte es. Gibt es jetzt noch ein Haus? Wird sie heimgehen können? Das Telefon erklingtklingelt. Sie sieht es an. Sie nimmt es ab. Das Die Antwort: zerstört. Es gibt kein Haus mehr. “Na ja,” denkt die Frau. “Jetzt ist es nicht mehr notwendig, die Kessel zu entkalken.”

The assignment was to write something using a lot of verbs with prefixes. Verbs with prefixes are kind of my German Achilles heel. (German heel?) I used eight. Woo!

It’s a stark, Hemingway-ian short short story about life and its unpredictability and phones ringing and stuff. It might even be worth your time to run it through a translator. I’ll correct my German when I get the story back from the teacher. (UPDATE 7/30: corrected.)

The most annoying thing about Europe is the trouble it takes to get here. My flying experience, I must say, was really not that nice. The first flight, from Dulles to Newark, was in a turboprop, and it started out just fine – I fell asleep, which is my measure of a good flight, and was dozing peacefully when suddenly the plane started jumping up and down. We hit three patches in a row of serious unexpected turbulence. A coke went flying (and not onto the person who’d ordered it) and there was some minor shrieking. Also, the temperature inside the plane was about 300 degrees. I think we were all pretty happy to make it out alive.

I had a much worse moment on the second flight, though, the one from Newark to Berlin. We had to sit for two hours on the runway in Newark because of a storm, but that wasn’t the bad part – they turned on the entertainment system and brought around water and snacks, and the time went very fast. No, the problem was Atul Gawande’s book Complications, about learning to be a surgeon. When I bought this book at the airport, I forgot that I am totally squeamish. After I woke up Monday morning, I opened it up and got to about the fifth page, where he describes his first attempt to put in a central line. (It didn’t go well.) By the time I had the sense to close the book, I had broken into a full-fledged cold sweat and I thought I was going to throw up. Whoops. I really want to read this book, though – maybe I can get through if I take it a few pages at a time, and also avoid reading it in the window seat of a 757 after two hours of bad sleep.

Despite the moments of misery, I would recommend Continental – it wasn’t their fault I made a bad choice of reading material, and the pilot on the second flight was really good about keeping us updated and informed during the two hours of waiting.

Check it out: I wrote about ice in the Bering Sea for the website of Deadliest Catch,  the Discovery Channel show about crab fishing in the Bering Sea. There’s been a lot more ice than usual the last couple of years, which is weird, what with the whole global warming thing. I explained why for the benefit of the show’s fans.

In other Deadliest Catch news, check out this awesome knitting pattern for a crab, inspired by the show.

A historic moment: for the first time, one of the stories I wrote for National Geographic is available online! It’s about a species of lemur called the silky sifaka. “Silky sifaka” is fun to say. Hear some of the silky sifaka’s amusing vocalizations here, on the researcher’s website.

My friend Joanna has started a cool blog over at the Montgomery County (Md.) Historical Society – every week she takes a different object from their collection and writes about it, like this late-19th-century butter mold. Here’s an excerpt:

Making butter was an important chore, and is referenced several times a month in Carrie’s diaries. A sample entry: “October 15^th, 1885: Roger & I made 47 ½ lbs Butter this morning. The rest of the day I sewed. M.H. Brooke called in the aft[ernoon].”  Next time you think your day is a little boring or tedious, remind yourself that at least you’re not making 47 pounds of butter (unless that’s your thing, of course).

Neat, huh? I love that she not only has the thing, she has the diary of the person who used it. Yay history.

Before leaving for six weeks in the Bering Sea this spring, I blogged kind of a lot about my preparations. I mean, I had to take steel-toed boots and a survival suit and stuff.

Preparing for 10 weeks in Germany is a lot easier. For example, the chances of falling into subzero water are somewhat lower. And if I forget something, I can buy it or have it mailed to me. This was difficult when I was on a boat in the middle of nowhere.

So I’ll take the good dictionary and my knitting needles and work clothes and a lot of shoes and…I dunno, we’ll see what else ends up in the pile. Any ideas?

Hey, guess what – swearing might actually be good for you. Or good for decreasing pain, anyway.

For a study that came out this weekend, a researcher in the UK had a bunch of undergrads stick their hands in buckets of ice water and say either a swear word or a neutral word over and over. The bucket of ice water is a pretty standard way to test pain tolerance. They did better while swearing.

Read my story, with funny quotes, here.

I had to ask the guy what the students’ favorite swear words were, of course. I giggled both at the list of words coming out of this perfectly polite British man’s mouth, and at the fact that he said “excuse me” after the last one, which is a word that people just don’t say in polite conversation. Or even impolite conversation. I said something about how weird this all was. He agreed. He said, “I’ve been doing interviews today when I was in sole charge of my [five-year-old] daughter and I had to sort of go to another room and tell people what the words were. ”

I haven’t hurt myself since I started working on the story last Friday, so I can’t tell you what I say in such situations. Well, that’s not true. I kind of put a table down on my toe on Saturday, which hurt a lot, but my mom was holding the other end of the table and I don’t think I am physiologically capable of swearing in front of my mom. I mostly gasped and jumped around. The researcher shares that particular inhibition. He said (possibly joking), “The paper doesn’t have any swear words in it because I wanted to be able to share it with my mother.”

Since a lot of what I do for a living is type while talking on the phone, I thought it would be smart to sort out my headset issues. (See vivid visual representation of headset issues here.)

I do have a headset – it’s the kind with a little plug that goes into the side of a cordless phone. But it doesn’t really work. I have to strain to hear, especially with quieter people. Which is a problem when I’m trying to type what they’re saying, understand what they’re saying, laugh at their jokes, and think of my next question, all at the same time.

First I looked into getting one of those headsets that goes on an old-school corded phone, between the thing you hold in your hand and the base of the phone. I had these at my last two jobs and they worked great. But when I looked into those headsets, I discovered why it was always such a huge production to get the office people to order one. At the low end, they’re about $150, and they go up (way up) from there.

It was time to consider alternatives. My dad has the same basic setup as me – a cheap headset that plugs into the side of a cordless phone – but he claims that his actually works. So I decided to try the scientific method. I spent a day at my parents’ house, trying out various alternatives while I reported a story about piranhas. First, I did an interview with my dad’s headset and cordless phone. Yep – it worked. I could hear.

Next, I talked to someone while using my dad’s cordless phone and *my* headset. Whaddya know – that worked, too. So clearly the problem was not with the headset, it was my cheapo cordless phone, right? So I bought a better phone, for about $40. I brought it home. I plugged in my headset (already proven to work). I called my dad to test it while typing. And it still wasn’t loud enough.

It turns out I’d left out one factor: When I’m at my parents’ house, I type on my laptop keyboard. When I’m at home, I type on my external keyboard, which goes CLACKETY CLACKETY CLACKETY. The problem wasn’t my headset – it was that my keyboard is too dang loud. So now I do phone interviews with the headset on my left ear and an earplug in my right. This also blocks out the sounds of the AC and the occasional freight train. I did other tests and discovered that my cheapo cordless phone was also part of the problem, so I’m using the new phone, too.

And everybody is happy! Except my massage therapist. Ha ha, kidding – I can’t afford massages. I was just going to mess up my shoulder and enjoy it, dang it. While walking uphill both ways. In the snow.