Who Are You Calling Tourist, Tourist?

Even though Frankfurt is supposedly overflowing with native English speakers, it’s by no means the first language you expect to hear on the street here. When I do happen to overhear English being spoken as I’m wandering through the city, I experience a strange and totally involuntary phenomenon: my ears perk up, my head immediately snaps in the direction of the sound, and my eyes scan the array of unfamiliar faces behind me, searching for the source. Again, this whole process is completely involuntary, like a reflex: my body physically reacts to the language it’s most accustomed to hearing.

I wish I could figure out how to switch this English-detector in my brain off, or at least set it on “low.” It becomes awkward: more often than not find myself having to avoid eye contact with whatever stranger happens to fall in my line of vision. It’s not as though I’m jonesing for some English conversation, either. Quite the opposite: there’s been a great deal more English in my diet over the last couple of days than I’d really like.

On Sunday I was walking through the Freßgass (literally, food alley), which is a street near the Alte Oper crammed with restaurants including a McDonald’s, a Pizza Hut, AND a Starbucks, when I realized that someone behind me was calling out—in English. “Excuse me, miss?”

Ears perk, head snap, eyes scan. Behind and to the right of me appeared a guy my age or a few years older, carying a backpack slung over one shoulder and—hilariously, to me, because I associate them with early-aughts pop stars like Mandy Moore— wearing a newsboy cap on his head. Tall, blonde hair, blue eyes—I thought for sure he must be German, but since he was the only other person within a hundred feet or so (Freßgass on a Sunday evening is not the most happening of places) he had to be the speaker. And he had to be speaking to me.

“Are you a tourist?” Australian, then, judging by his vowels. That other place that churns them out sandy-haired and statuesque.

I pondered the question for what to him must have seemed like a longer time than was necessary. But for me, especially given the mindset I’ve been in over the past couple days, it was an important, borderline-existential question. The longer I continued to self-identify as a tourist, the longer I would feel like one, right? In the interest of affirming my new life as a German resident, I said, “No.”

“Do you know of a place to stay around here?”

Dismayed, I answered in the negative. I’d been hoping the question would be something easy, like the one about the Alte Oper I’d fielded a few days before. I explained, apologetically, that I’d only been in the city for about a week, which garnered the response, “Oh, so you are a tourist.”

In the process of this exchange, we came upon a crosswalk, and while I waited for the little green man to appear, I found myself explaining my stay in Germany and my job in Frankfurt to this total stranger. I wanted to object to the “tourist” label, to say, “Hey dude, as of Friday I have a piece of paper that says I’m officially a Frankfurt resident.” But judging by the size of his Rucksack, the jaunty angle of newsboy cap, and his general carefree attitude, I took him for an experienced tourist himself: one of that strange breed known as the backpacker. It seemed to me that he was more qualified to say what did and did not qualify as a tourist than I was.

And, really, would it be so bad to regard myself as a tourist, at least for a little while? Using this guy as a model, being a tourist means being easygoing and friendly, not worrying overmuch about anything, and letting mistakes roll of your back—all of which are qualities I could use right now. Maybe, if I approached Frankfurt more from the perspective of a sightseer, trying to see and do and learn as much as possible in a limited time span, I could trick myself into feeling more at home here, more like an Einwohner (resident).

When the green man finally appeared, Australian Newsboy Backpacker made a huge show of walking alongside me and asking where I was headed. I knew enough about the city to tell him that, if he was looking for affordable accommodations, he definitely wasn’t going to find them in Westend. He seemed confused for a moment, like he’d forgotten that he’d originally come up to me looking for directions to the nearest hostel. I made it abundantly clear that he was under no circumstances to follow me any farther, and we parted ways.

Afterward, I felt kind of bad about not offering to help him find a hostel, or going with him to grab a bite to eat, as he suggested. After all, if this were a movie, this chance encounter would inevitably lead to grand adventures: we’d meet up with ANB’s ragtag troop of fellow-travelers, gallavant about the city, encounter obstacles, overcome those obstacles, and in the end learn Life Lessons and become Friends Forever. But sadly for me, ANB, his hypothetical ragtag troop, and you, my readers (all six of you), my life is not a movie. So I did not throw caution to the wind; instead, I went back to S’s apartment, put on my comfy pants, and watched Youtube videos until bedtime. After all, I had to go to work in the morning.

No spontaneous, adventurous tourist here. Just a plain old, domestic Einwohner.