On Being A Foreigner

Sunday morning we woke up to new snow, and as an added bonus: a layer of ice! It literally looked as if a giant had sneezed on the car and then it had frozen overnight. Nevertheless, we left home to get to our 9AM church block.

45 minutes later...

We were lost and a little frustrated that the roads had been so poorly cleared. But still, they weren't that bad- after all, I grew up in Utah! I've seen worse.

Apparently though, it's different in Germany. When we finally found the building around 9:15 we were surprised to see only 6 cars in the parking lot. Upon walking in, we were informed church had been cancelled due to the icy roads... : | Oh.

Fortunately, the German branch met at 11, so we were able to hang around until that time so we could at least participate in the sacrament. Bonus: we got our number on the calling tree list so we know the next time church is cancelled due to poor road conditions.

The German sacrament meeting was great, a sweet woman translated for us. Ray and I have been doing a bit of German each day. We're really determined to learn this language since we failed miserably at Mandarin. That being said, we've learned the alphabet and the sounds so we felt fairly confident when hymns came around that we could at least try and sing along.
Oh how wrong we were.

In the middle of the first hymn, singing loudly and confidently (my excellent choir teacher in high school always told us to sing loud and if you make a mistake, make it confidently), I could hear Ray snickering. He elbowed me discreetly and motioned for me to look a few pews ahead of us. There sat a little German boy, head fully turned around, staring at us with mouth wide open, and eyebrows raised in a look of what I can really only describe as: disdain mixed with confusion.

Apparently my two weeks of studying German haven't been enough to mask my OBVIOUSLY obnoxious American accent. You could tell this child was picking up on our off-key tones of German, and was clearly annoyed, appalled, alarmed and disgruntled at our inability to sing in his native tongue perfectly. He just kept staring.

The best part? I swear this child was no more than six. We giggled through the rest of the hymn and toned down our bravado so as not to offend him anymore.