No Sense and Serendipity

I was annoyed. No wait. Actually I was angry. After one month of traveling through Europe, I had not talked to anybody else except my best friend. Ok, at first this was more than alright with me, since I felt kinda shy in practicing a language in which I did not feel safe talking. And obviously my friend had a total lack of this dislike. Or maybe he just never felt embarrassed? I didn't know. In fact I did not care. On our journey he had collected addresses from people all over Europe while I was standing next to him grinning like some inbred idiot.

Right now, he had met some guys from the US and they went off to throw some hoops. Not that I was that hot on playing basketball, but the fact that my friend did not even care to ask me to join them really pissed me off.

So I was sitting at one of those wrenched wooden tables wasting some time by scribbling angry faces on some pieces of paper. At least until a good looking girl joined me at my table. I looked up. She smiled briefly and then started to write some postcards. All my anger about my disability during the last four weeks boiled deep inside of me. I somehow had to break that spell and finally dared to speak in a foreign language. No matter how stupid it would sound and how much of a fool I would turn myself into...

»Hey, you from English?«

After that she stayed two months at my parents place. We visited each other regularly. Her parents became my second family. And 12 years later I was the best man at her wedding...

No doubt, crossing a language border can change lives.