Is there a better way to learn a language than by immersing yourself completely in it? I don’t think so. Well, in 2019 I decided to take a leap and go do just that, immerse myself in the language by living with families and communities who only spoke German. And how did I do this? Through Workaway. 

Workaway is an internet platform where travelers get matched with hosts to live with them in exchange for a few hours of work per day. I heard about this through a friend named Daniel. He sold me on it as a way that a broke college student can be abroad for extended periods of time on the cheap. Cheap sounded good to me, so I planned a three-month-long trip through Europe built all around different Workaways in different locations. Since my goal was to learn German, what better way to start than by being in Bavaria, land of castles, alpine lakes, Lederhosen, Dirndln, and, of course, Oktoberfest! 

Workaway lets you search for hosts by region or by city, so I looked for workaways in the vicinity of Munich. As things go, I agreed to work for a host named Annette who lived 2 hours north of Munich. I had no idea what I was doing. All I knew was that I was going to be working for a family of five, who lived in a 300 year old house, with 20 chickens and four donkeys. 

Taking the Train from Munich to Wunsiedel

After my time in Liechtenstein I traveled to Munich where I stayed for 2 days. I then took the train to Regensburg, and then I took another to Marktredwitz and from there, I took a regional train into the town of Wunsiedel, where I was supposed to be picked up by my host mother. The issue was that in the transition from Marktredwitz to Wunsiedel I missed my train. For whatever reason (maybe I was too broke, or maybe I was too naive to think about it), I didn’t have a cell phone plan. I had no way to communicate with Annette that I missed the train and that I would be an hour late. 

I remember getting to this little town and just waiting outside the train station under a little awning trying to figure out what the heck I was going to do. I was pretty upset about the whole thing thinking “man, this is my first time. I’m supposed to be making a good impression.” You see, Workaway works with reviews. Hosts and travelers alike rate your profile, your work ethic, the way that you communicate, etc. Well, it seemed that I was off to a bad start. 

I was right in the middle of sulking and being upset when suddenly a beautiful, track-ready Audi R8 drove past and parked right across the street from me. Then out walked a handsome young man wearing a cool bomber jacket, jeans and sneakers. He got out, bought a cup of coffee and Brötchen, got back in his car and left. I was so surprised. This town only had about 7,000 inhabitants. What was a car like that doing in a town like this? But then I remembered that throughout my life, whenever I have been in a situation like the one I was in, where I had an issue and I had no idea how to fix it, often out of nowhere, a supercar would appear. I love supercars and they’ve become somewhat of a sign that God and I have going on. It’s a way for him to tell me “Don’t worry, Raul. It’s going to be okay.” 

Well, lo and behold! Moments later, the lady showed up, and she was all happy and chipper and said “Raul?” And I was like “Yes! Annette?” And she responded “Yes! I was here an hour ago, and you were not here, and so I thought that maybe he missed the train. So I’ll just come back in an hour.” She was so nonchalant about the whole thing, and I remember being so comforted by this. Annette was really nice, from the moment she greeted me she had a big smile, and her joyful personality always shone through. Praise God! What I thought was a bad start, turned out to be a great start. 

The 300 Year Old House in the Village of Biebersbach 

Annette and her family lived just outside of Wunsiedel in the town of Biebersbach. Biebersbach, which translates to Beaver’s Creek in English, was more of a village. There were no streets, only the one road that connected two bigger towns. All the houses branched off of it, and one of those houses was theirs. When I got there they gave me a tour of the property. Their house had a few buildings given the nature of their work. Some for animals, some for gardening, some for art. The main building, however, was a three-and-a-half story stone house built over 300 years ago. 

The house was painted yellow. Since it was built so long ago, before heating and insulation were a thing, the walls were almost a foot thick. The thick walls and small windows kept the house cool in the summer, and warm in the winter. I arrived there in April. It was still chilly, and one day it even snowed, yet we were kept warm thanks to several wood stoves. They only had a mini fridge. Anything else that needed to be kept cold they held in two stone cellars underground. 

They showed me the house, they showed me where I would shower, they showed me the donkeys, and the chickens. They also showed me my room, which was an old chicken coop converted to be a tiny living space with a loft. My mattress was in the loft and below was a table and a wood stove that I had to head up every night before going to bed. Then they said, “well, you can rest and you can begin tomorrow.” But it was only 4 in the afternoon, so I asked them to give me something to do. And that they did. Before long I was handed work clothes, work boots, and a shovel, and I promptly started shoveling chicken poop. 

Putting the Work in Workaway

My work mostly consisted of getting up at 7 a.m., doing a quick devotional, putting on work clothes, going out into the chilly morning to feed the chickens and then giving them water, then doing the same thing for the donkeys. After that, we would have a breakfast of oats, cheese, bread, jelly and dried meats. After breakfast, Annette would come out with me and we would do something in the garden. It was the first week of April when I got to their house so we were getting the garden ready for spring. There was a lot of tilling, pruning, weeding, digging, in the garden. When we were not in the garden we were probably walking the donkeys. 

While doing all of this Annette would teach me about gardening, and about the animals. She was very interested in others. They had done Workaway for a long time and she had lots of stories about other workawayers. She would ask me about life back home, and we would work and talk until 1 in the afternoon when it was lunch time. After lunch I was free to do what I wanted. I did this every day for 2 weeks except for on the weekends. 

The Big Franconian Party

When I first got to Biebersbach they had mentioned that there was going to be a party. I didn’t think much of it, but, as the weekend drew near, I realized that this was going to be a really big event. The first sign was the drinks. On Thursday of the first week Annette said, “Come with me to the store.” We drove into town to the drinks store and we loaded up with enough boxes and crates of soda, beer and wine to fill the whole Volkswagen station wagon. 

On Friday afternoon a guy with an Audi RS4 Avant towing a trailer showed up. He only spoke German and however he could he asked me to help him unload the trailer which was full of musical instruments and speakers and the like. We unloaded all of this into the stable, which was a big room on the ground level of the house which used to be where the horses were kept (You know, 300 years ago). Now it was just an open space with a wood stove, and which was to be the heart of the party. 

Friday night some family members arrived. Those people spoke really good English. The relatives were happy to be home, and they brought very high spirits with them. I don’t remember where they lived, but they were originally from this area of Germany, Franconia, which is a specific area of Northern Bavaria, and that has an even thicker accent and its own subculture relative to other parts of Bavaria. It became apparent very quickly that this was the unifying theme for the party, to celebrate Franconia. 

Saturday morning was a whirlwind of setting up tables, preparing food, setting up garden lights, the young man with the Audi RS4 testing the sound instruments, the band members arriving and people from the community trickling in. By the time 7pm came around there were 60 people crammed in the stable and many more out in the garden. I stood in the warmly lit room watching as the band started playing and people were cheering. The band, which was composed of five guys, was part music, part poetry, part comedy. 

At some point in the show, all the teenagers that were hanging out outside walked in, they walked right across the stage, disappeared into the cellar, then appeared with a bunch of beer in their arms and walked out. Everybody saw them, and the jokes rolled from the band and the crowd roared in laughter. There was lots of singing along, lots of interacting with the crowd, and lots of drinking. The party went on well into the wee hours of the morning. The whole night everyone was cheering, everyone was laughing, everyone was talking to their neighbor and truly having a good time. 

On Sunday morning everybody got up late. Nobody was doing anything. Breakfast happened at around 11. Annette, Muk, the girls, the visiting relatives and I lounged at the outdoor breakfast table. Everyone was feeling exactly the kind of lazy that The Commodores sang in Easy Like Sunday Morning, and I remember asking, “So is this what German people do on Sundays?” And they all said, “Yes.” 

Mini Adventures After Work

The second week was a lot more eventful for me. The party was over and the relatives were gone, so I got to do fun things outside of the house with Annette. She took me to Wunsiedel a few times to run errands with her. It was a cool little town harking back to medieval times and I got to explore it a little. Annette told me that helped organize an art show revolving around the theme of water. It was an interactive art show, where various artists in the area created all these art works throughout the town. One of them even hung like a glittery waterfall from the tower in the city center. 

One afternoon we rode bicycles for some 15 minutes to a kind of industrial area in the middle of the countryside because somebody that came to the party told us about a new club that they were opening. We went into a building that pretty much looked abandoned, and then we went up the elevator to the 7th floor, and walked into a large empty room with windows on every wall, and with a lot of tall 4 sided boxes scattered throughout. The guy who had invited us was giving us a lay of the land and explaining his plans. “The bar is gonna go over here. The lights are gonna go here. The DJ is gonna go here, and all of these boxes are gonna be covered in art. This is where we’re gonna hang the art.”  

The club was meant to be half music and half art gallery where there would be rotating artworks being displayed. This made perfect sense given the strong art community in the area and the product design school in the nearby town of Selb. I knew about the design school so I got excited and I started taking pictures of the space, when suddenly they told me “Please don’t post this on social media. This is a secret.” Well, I never did share those pictures, but I wish I could have seen it when it was complete. 

My One Day as a Lumberjack

The majority of my time in Biebersbach was spent with Annette. The two girls that lived at home were either at school or doing homework. The oldest daughter was a traveling semi-pro skateboarder, so she was never home, and Muk, the husband, was out working. Now, Muk was an interesting guy. When I first got there he greeted me with a big smile. He asked if I played table tennis. We chatted for a bit, he showed me the house and how to build the fires to keep the house warm, but then he was gone. 

Muk was a real life lumberjack, and he was just out working every day. For eight days I didn’t interact with him almost at all until we rode the bikes to the secret soon-to-be club/gallery. He was funny. He was cool. I just didn’t see him that much. That is, until the penultimate day that I was there. He found me after breakfast and he said “You’re coming with me today. I need you to help me move a tree.” What the heck! I get to be a lumberjack for a day? Sweet! I put on the hi-vis jacket, we loaded into his truck, and we headed into the woods. 

We drove on a service road out to the middle of the woods where we found a tree that seemed perfectly fine to me, but he said that it needed to be cut down for some reason. So we tied a cable and straps to the tree to ensure that it didn’t fall in the wrong direction, and then Muk got to work. He put in his chainsaw to the tree, a little here, a little there, until the crackle of the wood splitting warned us of the on coming BOOM! The tree fell and the earth shook. We cut the tree into three smaller sections, which we lifted on to the bed of the truck, and we drove them home. Then came the fun part. 

The whole time I was there I never knew that Muk had a hydraulic wood splitter. When we got home Muk said, “Now we have all this wood to chop, and my helper’s not here, so I need you to help me do this. I already asked Annette for your time.” Workaway officially trades room and board for 4-5 hours of work per day, but this was special. Muk asked for my help and I had nothing else to do, so I ended up hanging out with Muk the whole day. The work was pretty tedious, but nothing special. Muk would cut the wood into manageable chunks and I was just putting the wood through the splitter. And then came the stump. 

The stump was so dense and heavy that the both of us barely got it on to the splitter. When it was loaded I pressed the button I watched as the blade pushed and it squeezed and whined, but it couldn’t push hard enough to split this whole stump. We had to go at it from different angles. We had to crank it, twist it, and turn it, and on one of those times we finally managed to crack right through the middle. 

I emphatically let out a “Hell yeah!” I turned to look at Muk and caught him grinning from ear to ear. He was just as excited as I was to be breaking this final-boss of the tree. Sadly, in the process of cracking the stump, the splitter broke. There were pieces of metal that bent, and we couldn’t keep going anymore. Muk patted me on the back, gave me his thanks and said I was free, and thus concluded my day as a lumberjack. 

Leaving a Message for the Next Generation

On my last day I just did my usual task of looking after the chickens and then the donkeys, and that ended up being it. I had the rest of the day off until it was time for me to leave. At the beginning of this trip, when I missed the train, I was pretty upset. I had never been to Germany before. I didn’t know the culture. I thought I had set myself up for failure. I thought that maybe I had been disrespectful. Little did I know how great this family was going to be and how much fun I would have. Just because things go wrong doesn’t mean that they will stay wrong.

Before I left Annette told me about other workawayers that had stayed with them. She and her family had been part of Workaway for a long time and I just finished being one of them. In that little house where I stayed in the coop, there was a wall where all the workawayers would sign and they would leave a word of encouragement or a message. She gave me a sharpie and asked me to write my own for the next person, and I remember writing down, “be grateful, always.”

• P.S. All of this happened while speaking mostly German. I improved a lot just by using the little German I knew, and then letting my host families help me build the bridge from beginner to intermediate to proficient. 

Also, Thank you Muk for taking me to get my first Schnitzel. 

They have since turned their house into an artist retreat and into a lodge. Find them at their Facebook page here.

I hope this story is encouraging to you. If you know somebody that you think this might be encouraging to as well, go ahead and share it with them!