In Prague, you can buy a pint of beer for around $2.00. And I’m not talking a Bud or Miller Light kind of beer. I’m talking a top-quality, world-renown pint of happiness. It’s a point of pride for Czech people, and I can see why. After getting off our first, one-way train, exhausted, thirsty, hungry, and schooled, finding that those fabled prices were true helped get us back on the right foot. Prices are low in the Czech Republic in general, and the beer definitely takes the cake. Unfortunately, not all prices in Europe are this low. In Oslo, we wanted to grab a quick bite of lunch our first…
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Learning the Ropes
It was 6:30 in the morning, and we were sprinting across Krakow as fast as our double-backpacks would let us. Despite the panic, we were feeling the thrill of boarding our first one-way train. We made it to the station with about 15 minutes to spare, stopped briefly to grab a quick bite of breakfast (and a shot of caffeine), and then jumped onto our train. Done! Made it! We were officially on our adventure, our nomadic experiment. The plan: in the spirit of a memoir I had read a few months earlier, our plan for the next few weeks, albeit for a couple plane tickets we already needed to…
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Translations Part 5: Washers
We stayed with Mary for a few days, exploring different places near Bialka Tatranska, and eventually trekking to Krakow. This was where we’d say good-bye to Mary and officially start on our own in Eastern Europe, armed with Google Translate and a few survival phrases, along with a couple backpacks each and a loose itinerary for the next 6 weeks. It was exciting and stressful. The trek to Krakow from Bialka Tatranska is lovely (and much lovelier when I’m not jet-lagged and narcoleptic on my way to BT). Poland is really beautiful: rolling hills grazing livestock, and steep-roofed, colorful houses dot the scenery. Mary told us that after Poland was…
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Translations Part 4: Receipts
For our next few restaurant experiences, we discovered the camera button on Google translate. If you haven’t seen this, seriously, go download the app and check it out. While not perfect, it usually can do the job well enough for you to get the gist of what you’re trying to read, along with a healthy dose of presumably mistaken word or phrase translations. The first time we used the app, we used it to help translate our receipt at a Polish restaurant, which seemed like it had a couple extra items. At this moment, we hadn’t realized that you could actually take a picture of what you were looking at;…
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Translations Part 3: Restaurants
It would be a few weeks and bumbling through several languages later before we realized this simple truth while traveling: you’d be surprised how much you can do in a restaurant without language. At least in the countries we’ve been to, restaurants operate in pretty much the same way. They all follow what I’ve come to know as, “The Script.” It goes something like this: You walk in. You say hello. They ask you how many people, sometimes if you want to sit inside or outside (usually with helpful hand gestures). Then, they physically walk you to an available table and point. You sit down. The first thing they’ll ask…
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Translations Part 2: Directions
In being in countries where we didn’t speak the language for the first time, there is a progression for learning how to get around. First, we relied on someone else. That person was Mary. In Poland, this worked very well. We didn’t have to do anything, really, except answer her questions and convince her that we truly didn’t want fourth helpings. In Slovakia, however, that safety net grew some holes. The moment we realized this was probably while we were trying to figure out how to get to the castle that was right in front of us. Like really, actually right in front of us propped up on a hill.…
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Translations Part 1: Signs
The second time we went to Poland was when arrived in Europe to live this past year. Handling my jetlag better this time, I was able to stay awake for more conversations in the car and in the bus, learning more deeply about the history written in the cities and towns. It truly is jarring to realize you’re staring at a building that was built in this lifetime under communist rule. It’s one thing to learn about communism in school, but a whole different thing to hear from someone you know about how communism affected where they chose to live in college and why they chose to leave their home.…