Chapter 9: Sprechen Sie Englisch? Nein.

One of my readers has suggested that I include a map of our journey along the Danube. Here's the route along the river, although the bicycle route doesn't follow it exactly.

Rob and I have always been apprehensive about visiting a country where the native language is something other than English. But our second night camping we talked with a young Swiss couple also traveling by bike. The woman assured us that we would have no trouble finding people who speak English. "Especially young people," she said. "Everyone learns English now."

In the next town we stopped in a bakery and I asked the young woman at the counter, "Sprechen Sie Englisch?"

"Nein," she said. 

When Rob and I travel, we love talking to strangers. We never know what priceless piece of advice they will share with us. On a bike trip in Nova Scotia we stopped at a restaurant hoping to get some lunch. It was closed because it was Sunday and it was run by some sort of religious group that forbade working on Sunday, but many of its members were hanging out and said they would give us some soup; they just couldn't sell it. While we were enjoying our free meal, someone asked us, "Are you going to Kejimkujik?" 

Rob shook his head and I said, "We weren't planning on it. Where is it?" 

They explained that it was a national park in the middle of the province, made up mostly of lakes. "You have to go."

So we turned inland and rode 95 miles that day so we could sleep on the shore of a lake in a national park that nobody we know has ever heard of.  We rented a canoe and spent a lazy day paddling down a creek and along the shores of one of the many lakes, watching out for turtles sunning themselves on rocks, and sunning ourselves under a clear blue sky, no motorboat noise to disturb the quiet wilderness. We've returned three times.

How do you get valuable information like this if you don't speak the native language? And we wonder about so many things when we are on the road. What is that agricultural crop we see everywhere? What are those birds hanging out in the fields? Why is the beer so cheap? 

We're both fluent in English. Neither of us has a second language.

Rob struggled with French in high school and got out of his college foreign language requirement by taking a computer programming class. And oddly enough, I believe him. He had to pass a French class to get his Ph.D. and somehow he got through it. But none of it stuck. We went to France several years later. One evening after I placed my order for dessert he confidently said, "Moi, aussi!" I said, "Do you know what you ordered?" and he replied, "I have no idea." 

I studied French in high school and carried that knowledge into a French literature class in college. But I never solidified my book learning into actual skill at understanding answers to my carefully crafted questions.

So every time we ponder traveling in a country where the primary language isn't English, we hesitate. Whenever I ask my well-traveled friends how they get around, they answer, "It doesn't matter. People speak English or you figure it out." They make it sound so easy.

In spite of our friends' reassurances we've pretty much kept our travels to English-speaking countries. We've been to Canada countless times, Scotland, Ireland, England, and Australia.

In 2013 we decided to leave our comfort zones and visit Italy. I  planned every detail. I couldn’t have done it without the internet. If a website was in Italian, I’d hit the translate-to-English key and found all the information I needed. I’d send an email to a hotel and the answer would come back in English. We had every night booked and train tickets bought. We studied Rick Steves' travel guides. We knew which buses we needed to catch and where to sit for the best views. We spent three weeks in Italy and found that, except when we ventured out to some small towns on our bikes, people were happy to practice their English on us. 

Before going to Italy we learned a few key Italian phrases. Prior to getting off the plane in Munich our familiarity with the German language was knowing where we had packed Rick Steves' German Phrase Book & Dictionary.

Our friends didn't lie. We did get by. In one cafe we stopped in, when I asked the proprietor, "Sprechen sie Englisch?" He answered, "Nein." Then he went from table to table, calling out, "Englisch? Englisch?" until a young man stepped up to help us translate. 

With assistance we ordered tea and buttered pretzels, a Bavarian specialty. They were okay, nothing special. We did notice a bicyclist sitting at the table next to us drinking beer. It was 10:45 in the morning. I said to Rob, "I guess it's never too early for a beer in Germany."

When we took the wooden barge through the Danube Gorge to the Weltenburg Benedictine Abbey a couple young men came along to help us understand the boat pilot.

Still, whenever we found someone who was fluent in English and had the time to talk, we peppered them with questions and savored the conversation. We'll value those memories.

But for our next trip we're planning to stay in the United States, where the native language is still English.