Taxi!

My standard mode of transportation these days consists of my own two feet, followed closely by two wheels powered by my own two feet (just not during Lent!). A distant third is the train, and cars happen so seldom in my life right now that they don't even get a place on the list.

Number 4, and in some ways my favorite, is taxis.

In my experience, taxi drivers all over the world are wonderful 7-minute conversationalists. Clearly they get lots of practice - imagine a day broken up into 7-minute chunks, with welcome or annoying pauses in between, depending on your attitude. You have to be a special kind of person to enjoy that, or even tolerate it for any length of time.

I hardly ever have problems engaging taxi drivers in conversation. Most of them obligingly leave photos or hobby paraphernalia in strategic places on the dashboard. Find the clue and ask about it, and your seven minutes are golden. Or share a common frustration, like traffic lights that turn red at the wrong moment. If nothing else, comment on a silly street sign or an impressive-looking building, and then you'll get not only conversation, but a little history or geography lesson too. (You're probably all shocked to hear that not engaging the taxi driver in conversation is not really something that crosses my mind.)

Even after 4 years and with my child-like spongy mind for grammar, I still speak two very different kinds of German - Confident and Cool as a Cucumber Jess speaks German just as well as you please, even to the point of being mistaken for a real German herself. This Jess gets cocked-headed puzzled looks the first time she makes a mistake during the conversation and astounded looks when she mentions that she's from the US. "But you were born here, right?"

Much more aggressive and omnipresent is Timid as a Church Mouse Jess, who trips over her tongue and stutters and stammers and lisps for good measure. Church partners, small business owners and my doctor often get La Timida, while kids, a few selected friends and taxi drivers meet Confident Jess. With taxi drivers it's easy, because we're on a level - for the most part they're foreigners, and even if you've lived here for 20 years, you still have the foreigner's boundaries of "us" and "them." So as soon as they find out I'm a not-German too, we're buds and we can chatter away the 7 minutes in blissful camaraderie. We had three taxi drivers today - a Turkish cook, an Iranian musician, and a German history buff - and if I lived in Hannover, I'd have gotten their telephone numbers.