c50275dc-bace-4eb5-81d4-51fc910e27d7.mp3

I wish I could be more helpful and say you should find your dream path and paint a rainbow to your love cloud. But most of us are so stuck in this notion of how stuff should go that we want to find one of seven stories that matches our narrative. The fact is that most of us are wandering around scared shitless, wondering what the fuck's going to happen [00:00:30] next. That's as true when you're 11 as it is when you're in your forties. It's one reason that people feel very discouraged or disinclined to try new things. They feel like it's not for them. You're trying to get the narrative, but my narrative is that have never known what's coming next. I still don't. I fell down the right set of stairs and have been surrounded by people who have picked me up and said, Let's try this again.

This quote is by Merlin Mann, one of my favorite people [00:01:00] on the internet. I love the quote, and I hope that at the end of this episode, you'll see why. Because I feel like my life was supposed to go in a very different direction than it actually did. That would have been much more likely. The little town I grew up in was clearly on the wrong side of the Iron Curtain, dangerously close even to what used to be called the Valley of the Clueless. The area around the city of Dresden, where it was difficult or even impossible to pick up TV stations broadcasting from western Germany [00:01:30] and foreign languages, they didn't exactly run in the family.

We are all Aussies people from the former German Democratic Republic. And if you were born there before 1989, the only foreign language taught at school was probably Russian for obvious reasons, which meant that once the typical Aussie left school and moved on in his life, he would quickly forget most, but maybe not everything. This, at least. In any case, I was just a small boy when the wall came down [00:02:00] in 1989. Because of my tender age, I think I can be forgiven for not knowing where I was when the news broke. Probably sound asleep in my bed. But when eventually the time came for me to start learning foreign languages at school, Russian had ceded its default status to English at my school and possibly many others in the east. Teachers had to be retrained from the language of Pushkin to that of Shakespeare. I [00:02:30] distinctly remember my first English classes in fifth grade, being told by a former Russian teacher and later on by a teacher of music and religion who helpfully informed us about how the letter o was pronounced the same in our sex and dialect of German and in English. So there you go. In seventh grade, we were given the choice between more signs God know all languages. Yay! Having always been rather bad at chemistry, biology and the like. [00:03:00] I chose languages. The fact that in a class of 15 students there were 14 girls was an omen of my future in the interpreting profession.

So I had started English in fifth grade, added French two years later and then rush in in eighth grade. For a while, I even dabbled in Latin, but I don't remember much from those long afternoon hours, except for the jokes I exchanged with my best friend who sat next to me. Mind you, my memories from French classes are also rather limited, limited to a simple [00:03:30] yet delicious recipe for French pancakes to be precise, a recipe that I use to this day, much to the joy of my two kids. My French teacher did not really like me. She thought I was lazy. She was right, of course. My Russian teacher, though, was great. She knew how to teach a foreign language and, among many other things, introduced us to Russian music. No, not Tchaikovsky. Start the go, oh, I never. [00:04:00] Largely, she never knock on. Those of you, sir, did some work on it. Oh, it's in your music. It's one of the best ways, if not the best way to explore a foreign language and other cultures. I feel this is especially true for French. I discovered French music relatively late at university, but when I did, the French language [00:04:30] became much more approachable. A few years later, when I was already at university, it was with a lot of luck, hard work and the trust that one of my professors placed in me that I found myself translating the autobiography of Charles Nauvoo for a German publishing house and even interpreting for him at the Leipzig Book Fair.

You are the one for me, for me, for me, for me. Formidable. You all my love. Very, very, [00:05:00] very, very tough love. Here's why. But let's take it step by step for now. School was out not just for summer, but for good. We don't really do gap year in Germany. Military service doesn't count. I think so. I had to figure out what to do, what to study. Maybe music. Well, music had always been a passion of mine. When I was in school, I played in bands, I sang in choirs and performed in [00:05:30] musicals, but I knew I wasn't good enough to make it my profession. So what about teaching? No, not my thing. Languages? Why not? I checked with Leipzig University. I had to offer and somehow discovered their translation and interpretation program. It piqued my interest, so I signed up for the entrance exam and passed. Now, though, there were a few months to fill before university would start. My best friend was about to go on a trip to Romania with a local church youth group. He asked me to come along since they needed a second [00:06:00] driver and chaperon. Back then, I knew as much about Romania as most people, i.e. almost nothing. I had heard about the vampires, though. The trip turned out to be one of the best I ever made in my whole life. Not only did I get to spend time abroad with my best friend. I also discovered a country I knew nothing about and met lots of wonderful people.

I fell in love in love with the country, the people, the culture, the nature, everything. And I didn't [00:06:30] even speak a word of Romanian yet. Meanwhile, though, I had started my interpreting studies, French, Russian and English, where my languages did, I mention I signed up for computer science first? Well, that was a really stupid idea. I quit after a few weeks of nonstop mathematics and added a third language instead. But university, it was great. And the good old days before Bas and Mas, we had plenty of time to explore other subjects than just language or communication. During the first two [00:07:00] years, we were given a really solid foundation in our languages and we tried our hand at translating and interpreting. Then came the half time exams, and after that, everybody left for some time abroad. Most of my friends picked France. Or Spain, and they left the Erasmus life for one semester. But there were an adventurous few among us that had quite a different destination. Russia. [00:07:30] I spent one semester at the Piatti Gorge State Linguistic University. Don't worry if you've never heard of divorce, neither had I. It's a city of about 140000 inhabitants situated in the southwest of the Russian Federation, close to the infamous Caucasus republics Piety Gorge, which roughly translates to five peaks. It's famous for being one of the oldest [00:08:00] spa resorts in Russia, and as the place where famous poet Mikhail Lermontov was shot in a duel in 1841. Living there, studying, there was a great experience. The atmosphere of the city, the people from so many different backgrounds.

Remember this is the Caucasus, the food, the nearby mountains. We even went to the Black Sea for a few days. I assume you've heard of Sochi, the city at the Caucasian Riviera with a subtropical climate that [00:08:30] hosted the 2014 Winter Olympics. Well, we were there before. It was cool, literally. When I came back to Leipzig in early 2002, the world was still under shock from 911, which we had barely heard about in our Russian cocoon. And Europe had just introduced a new currency. I got back to work and start the actual interpretation stage of my degree. Apart from the three languages I studied officially, Romania [00:09:00] and its language was still very much on my mind. So in 2003, I started a Romanian language course at university, mostly out of curiosity and out of affection towards the country and the people. Once again, I was lucky to have a great teacher who not only taught me a language but helped me explore an entire cultural universe. She also knew an awful lot about linguistics and could chose links and similarities between Romanian and other languages, which was enormously helpful for us. All [00:09:30] throughout my years of study, I would look for and accept interpreting assignments. I usually had no idea, not really what I got myself into, but hey, what could possibly go wrong? Well, some things did go wrong. Like this one job where I worked on my own for too long and people would come to me during the coffee break asking, This is difficult, isn't it? But most of the time it went well, and I thought to myself, This is fun.

This is what I wanted to do for a living. [00:10:00] I'll just have to increase my rates so I can make a living. I eventually took my final exams at Leipzig University successfully, which I credit to no small degree to the fact that a bunch of us had been in a self study group for a few years, giving each other's speeches and feedback. What was left to do now to get my diploma was the final thesis. One of my professors had a long list of topics suggestions the student would write about one of them and the professor got to use the material for one of his publications. That was [00:10:30] basically how it worked, and I didn't want to do that. Instead, I came up with my own topic using technology for interpreting. I picked two nice professors that could actually help me and rolled up my sleeves for six months. I basically lived in the University Library, but so did my friends with mutual support and lots of coffee. We managed to hand in our pamphlets in time and eventually became proper diploma dementia, but it still wasn't done. I had made good progress learning Romanian and even took translation classes, [00:11:00] so I wanted to proper degree to. Since that wasn't possible at Leipzig University, I added two more semesters to my academic career by enrolling in an MCI, a European Masters in conference interpreting at Mainz University in gammas time.

It had been set up to train interpreters for Romania's upcoming accession to the European Union so that I was living more or less on the other side of the country, shuttling back and forth by train between this and the woman I had just married. [00:11:30] On the other hand, it was a great time. We were a small group of students, most of them native speakers of Romanian, which was great for my active speaking skills, which have since evaporated. We got to spend a few weeks at a Romanian university. We visited the European Commission and the European Parliament in Brussels and Zip. Just like that, two semesters flew by. There was one more thing I did during their time. Together with some of the other students, we signed up for an EU interpreter competition. [00:12:00] There was an opening for interpreters with Romanian, and we figured we'd just give this a try and see how far we would come. It turns out two of us made it all the way. Fast forward to today, 2015. I've lived here in Brussels for over eight years now. My two kids were born here. They go to school here. I work as a conference interpreter. If someone had said that to me back then in the 1980s, I would have called them crazy. But the truth is, it's [00:12:30] life. That's crazy. So there you go. Those are all the sets of stairs that I fell down over the years and the people who picked me up when I did. What about you?