As most of you know, we are not from the same country and do thus not share the same mother-language. The most received question to us has always been – and still is: ‘in which language do you communicate together?’ In the first years our answer was: English, now our answer is: a mix of English, Dutch and German. Which is bad, we know. Over the years we chose our favourite words in each language and use them mixed up all together. We kind of have developed our own language by now. One of the goals of the bike tour is to get this sorted out. But after being on the road for 2 months, it might be a bigger challenge than we first expected…
Communicating on the road is very difficult when you bike behind each other with a distance of at least 2 metres. Besides, wind, rain, cars etc. do influence what you hear as well. Below we have set out a typical conversation on the bike between us both, we often need to scream in order to understand each other (which is therefore written in capital letters). It is quite funny actually, we often end up laughing. Important detail: Oliver bikes in the front 99% of the time, Chloé follows behind with 2-3 meters distance and froggi is often hiding in one of the bike bags.
(Luckily, we do have some more interesting conversations during the rest of our days when we are not sitting in our bike seats.)
A typical conversation on the bike:
Oliver (NL-EN-DE): ‘Heb je die church gezien? War super schön!’
{Did you see that church? Looked very nice!}
Chloé (NL): ‘Hè wat???‘
{What???}
Oliver (EN): ‘That church looked nice!’
Chloé (DE-EN): ‘ICH VERSTEH GAR NICHTS! WHICH LANGUAGE?‘
{I DON’T UNDERSTAND ANYTHING! WHICH LANGUAGE?}
Oliver (EN): ‘…NICE CHURCH!‘
Chloé (EN): ‘Oh I did not see it’
Oliver (EN): ‘HOW COULD YOU MISS THAT?’
Chloé (NL): ‘Ik was aan het dromen’
{I was dreaming}
Oliver (NL): ‘De bomen?’
{Trees?}
Chloé (NL): ‘DROMEN’
{DREAMING}
Oliver (DE): ‘Achsooo… schon wieder…?!’
{Ahhh again?!}
froggi (EN): ‘oh… these two… I’ll buy them a walky-talky for Christmas… 😉’
froggi & co 