The Language Barrier
Wandering around Eastern Europe this summer, the biggest challenge we faced was the language barrier. Aside from other tourists and the few people working in the tourism industry, nobody else spoke any English. And there's really no reason they should have, since they didn't generally need to use it. We certainly hadn't made much effort to learn the local languages. Mind you, it would have been quite an undertaking to learn four different languages just so we could use each for a few days. But none of that logic made it any easier for us when we wanted to ask for plain old tap water at every restaurant we visited. Even my normally effective use of miming failed us. After watching me pantomime the act of turning a tap to fill a glass with liquid and drink it, they always assumed we wanted beer.
At other times we felt like we were being swindled when I am positive that we inadvertently agreed to things we did not understand at all. Righteous indignation is hard to summon up in the face of complete and utter vocabulary failure. There was the time at the crepe place in Budapest where the staff didn't seem to grok the idea behind receipts. Accustomed to the enthusiasm with which North American cashiers issue receipts and the reliability with which I have always been issued what I pay for, I was thrown for a loop when they didn't hand me a receipt for my order and then later disavowed all knowledge of having taken such an order. Another time, in Istanbul, we got duped into spending more than we'd expected at a Hamam because nether of us had any idea what we were agreeing to when they asked us questions in Turkish. Fortunately, I think we were taken for no more than $20 over the entire trip. All of this did, of course, make me very appreciative of the tour guide from the hostel in Brasov, who spoke excellent English and seemed more than happy to answer my endless stream of questions about the Romanian culture and history. And sometimes the language barrier did not prevent me from socializing, like when I drank wine in a park with a random French couple. I speak less French than they did English but given enough wine that didn't seem to matter as laughter sounds pretty similar in either language. My one linguistic victory involved picking up the Cyrillic alphabet over the course of 3 days through sheer osmosis and deduction. I began trying to learn it by matching patterns on the few pieces of text I saw in both English and Bulgarian and then moved on to forming hypotheses that we tested at medium risk to our schedule. By the time we left Bulgaria I was pleasantly surprised to discover I could phonetically read most of the Cyrillic signs we encountered. Still had little idea what most of it meant but the bar had been lowered a great deal by that point.
