You Say Potato...

Dublin, Ireland

Some of these things have become commonplace to me now. Some of them are still bizarre. I'll never be able to cross the street confidently again. It's still really hard to get used to that other-side-of-the-road business.

You call on someone at their flat. You ring someone on their phone. You use your mobile, not your cellphone.

It's a shop, not a store.
Flatmates, not roommates.
Lorry, not truck. Lift, not elevator. On and on...

It's men on the pitch, not players on the field.
It's go on Ireland, not come on Ireland.
They're footballers. They play a match, not a game.
It's "Ireland have scored", not "Ireland has scored". This is common with any collective noun: "The family have a house."

Detached houses are so rare that they're called "detached houses" in conversation. Also: holy roundabouts, Batman.

The Irish have an impressive number of synonyms for common words. Mates, lads, boys. It makes conversation with them really engaging. They're so good at telling stories that you wish you had a microphone on you all the time.

You go out and have some good craic (fun). This is a big one. They pronounce it "crack."

You have pints at the pub, not drinks at the bar, although you sit at a bar in the pub. Pubs have to list all their prices on a sheet of paper. A pint of "the black stuff" is Guinness, though it has other names: Stout, "a beer". Pint o' plain is the same thing.

"When things go wrong and will not come right,
Though you do the best you can,
When life looks black as the hour of night -
A pint of plain is your only man."

A Guinness Quality Team van travels around to pubs and makes sure the Guinness is being served to their standards. Most pubs have at least 3 Guinness taps. Pints are actually bigger in Ireland. For these prices, they ought to be. Pubs close around 1 AM, except Thursday-Saturday where some pubs can remain open til 3:30 AM.

It's a loo, not a bathroom. Usually you have to pay for it in public places. It's a queue, not a line.

Almost all doors have a button you have to hold down to exit. Light switches are big flat buttons, not little finger-sized switches. The second floor of a building is actually called the first floor.

Water faucets almost always have two spouts, with hot and cold water coming out of either. You have to switch back and forth between the two running streams as you simultaneously freeze and burn yourself.

They say brilliant a lot, and cheers. When they end a phone conversation, they say "bye" just about 10 times in a row. They pronounce it "boy". Boy boy boy boy.

Most clocks are on a 24-hour scale, though you convert to AM and PM in conversation. Older people use feet and ounces, younger people use meters and liters. Your weight is in stone, which is one stone per 14 pounds. Try to figure that one out.

All the churches in Dublin ring their bells at noon and at 6 PM.

People eat lunch around 2 PM. In rural areas (and in Trinity), businesses and banks will be closed from 12:30 to 2 or so. Typical business hours then are 10 AM to 12:30, and 2:00 PM to 4 PM. How's that for a working day! It makes talking to a particular department really frustrating.

Radio stations are on even frequencies, ie. 105.2 FM.

Water comes in two varieties, still and sparkling. This is very common in Europe.

There are no ketchup dispensers at McDonald's, only packets. Yes, it's Heinz. They have sachets of salt instead of shakers. Most people leave their trays on the table after they're done eating.

In the school cafeteria, it's likely that you'll be served a meat with 3 varieties of potatoes: mashed, steamed, and fried. When I pointed out how crazy that was to a classmate, he didn't understand me.

Newspapers are far more colorful, with bigger headlines and, honestly, far dirtier content. Also, the news is really depressing here. They show photos of people in car accidents, and they run a lot of stories of children who have been killed or abducted, with their photos right on the front page. (I guess it's because it's a small island?)

Each morning, everyone you see will be holding a newspaper, and some people stand in the streets giving away dailys. The Irish read more newspapers per capita than anyone in the world, so they say.

TV news comes from Britain, either the BBC or Sky News, and so mentions Ireland only rarely.

People say "these islands" -- never the British Isles.

Movies are coming out "at cinemas", not "in theaters".

Begging is far more prevalent here. Also, you're likely to see a very sophisticated group of musicians playing saxophones, violins, drums, with all their sound equipment set up, sitting in the middle of the sidewalk. These groups come and go, normally staying a week or two, and then you'll never see them again.

Every street has a bookmaker. Paddy Power is a big one. There are more bookmakers than fast food restaurants, and little old ladies and businessmen and kids alike go in and out. They have TVs set up inside, and they really would bet on a fly moving up the wall.

People drive up to Belfast to do their shopping in Northern Ireland, while the Pound is so weak against the Euro. It takes less than 2 hours to get up there.

Gas works out to be $7 USD a gallon.

A B C D E F G Hache I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Zed.

The number 48 is farty-eigtch. 33 is terty-tree.

There are tons more. I'll post them as they come to me.

Schnitzel with Noodles

Salzburg, Austria

The last city on my tour de Europe was Salzburg. I took the midnight train from Prague to Salzburg. This was NOT a main line. I had four changes to make to get to my final destination, and at 1:30 AM we stopped in the tiniest train station in the middle of the Czech Republic. I got off unknowingly, thinking that I'd have to wait at that station until my train came at 4:00 AM.

I stepped into the freezing cold of a little Czech mountain town. No one around. Little puddles of rain filled the street's potholes, reflecting the light from flickering street lamps. A taxi driver smoked a cigarette, waiting for absolutely no one. I shuffled around for a bit, walking through empty streets, and made my way back to the train station when I saw that the same train was still sitting there, with its engine now shut off. I decided that this train was probably the same one that was leaving at 4:00 AM, so I opened the door, climbed aboard, found an open sleeper car, and fell asleep.

When I woke up we were in České Budějovice, a city in southern Czech Republic. I got off there and waited in the station for a couple hours, watching as the day began and people began to fill up the train station, on their way to work. No where else in the world can you see a businessman get off a train at 6:30 AM, walk over to a kiosk, buy a beer, chug it, and buy another beer for the road. Several people did that.

I was on my second-to-last train, about to get off the train in Linz, where I'd transfer to Salzburg... but I got off a stop too early! I heard "Linz" announced on the train in German and thought, oh, time to get off, but I was just in the suburbs. Big whoops. I knew I made the mistake right away, and watched helplessly as my train disappeared out of sight.

Do you know how hard it is to ask people on the street where "Südbahnhof" (southern railway station) is? I kept forgetting the name. What is it... hoff... Hasselhoff? Hofbrauhaus? Häagen-Dazs? I couldn't remember for the life of me, and people I asked were just as confused.

Luckily I asked this one guy, and I must have seemed so pathetic that his wife took pity and asked him to drive me to the place. It was only a mile or two away, but I had no idea where anything was. They didn't speak a word of English, and I could only lean up to the front seat and point at myself and say, "Deutsch nein." Which isn't how you say that anyway, but they laughed. "English no," she said smiling. At least they got the idea. "Danke danke danke," I repeated, getting out of the car at my train station, and then for good measure, "Thank you very much," which is the universal Americanism everyone on Earth knows and imitates. They laughed again and waved. Wundervoll!

Salzburg is a little town, way more famous than you'd imagine for how tiny it is. It sits on the border of southern Germany and the Austrian Alps. The city runs along the Salzach river, and it's surrounded by mountains, green farmland, and above everything, a mountain with a castle and the abbey from the Sound of Music.

I don't have to tell you how beautiful it was. Actually, if you've seen the Sound of Music, you know. I know that sounds lame, but it's true. That movie depicts the city and the surrounding area very well.

So what better way to see the city than to go on a Sound of Music tour? Yes, that's right. It wasn't my idea. I've heard from friends, if you go to Salzburg, do the Sound of Music tour. They were right.

I ended up in a van with 7 other people and our tour guide, and we drove around Salzburg, the Alps, and the countryside, for four hours, listening to the Sound of Music CD. (Ok, that was a tad much.) But I got to see so much of that part of Austria, including all of Salzburg and the surrounding villages. I heard the history of the Nazi annexation of Austria, heard about the creation, reception and unbelievable success of the Sound of Music (it is the 3rd highest-grossing movie ever, at $1.022 billion), and heard the real story of the von Trapps, which is actually quite fascinating - minus Gretl.











Mozart was born in Salzburg too, and the guy who wrote Silent Night.

Interestingly, Austrians hate the Sound of Music. Probably because it brings a flood of camera-strapped tourists who think that it's the cleverest idea in the world to sing Do a Deer dancing down the street. I only saw that happen once, luckily.

After the tour, the nine of us drove back to the city center and started to say our goodbyes. But a few of us got to talking with our tour guide, asking her about her background. Turns out she was an American who had lived in Austria for the last 17 years. She had so many stories to tell kind of off the record about Austrians, their response to the 20-year anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall, and also where to find the best schnitzel in the city. After awhile, she told us that she had missed her bus anyway, so why don't we just go to a restaurant and try the wienerschnitzel!

We had a blast. There was an American girl my age who was couch-surfing (that's my next goal), an Australian girl who was hiking around Europe with some friends after high school (which is very common for Australians), and a couple from Phoenix who were celebrating their anniversary. I got to talking with the guy and he had lived in Pittsburgh for awhile and loved it!

The food was delicious. By the end of the night, several beers later, the 6 of us were listening to our tour guide tell stories about her travels around Europe and what it was like to live away from home for 17 years. There's no way I could do it.

The next morning I took a train back to Vienna, where I spent the day walking everywhere to see the things I missed the first time around, which was a lot. I hung out with a Norwegian PhD student I met at the hostel. He was studying in Austria and wanted to go get kielbasi and bratwursts, so we did.

I'd love to do a trip like this again, maybe in eastern Eastern Europe. It didn't cost me that much, actually. It's amazing how much money you can save when you pay pennies for airfare, stay in youth hostels, and sleep on trains.

Mullets and Castles

Prague, Czech Republic

[Again, I only have a few pictures, because my camera's memory card took a dump. I'll try to post what pictures I have.]

I took a train on Saturday morning from Vienna to the Czech Republic. It was a 5-hour train ride.

I think riding the train can be the best part of a trip. As we made our way through Austria and into the Czech Republic, the scenery and people began to change dramatically. In Eastern Austria, we passed through gently rolling hills and green fields, past multicolored trees and windmills, gorgeous church towers and little villages with very Austrian-looking wooden houses and sloped roofs.

As we drifted closer to the border, the landscape changed, and the houses became more sparse and more rundown. We passed through dilapidated and abandoned Czech mill towns into steeper mountain country, as a mist descended in the valleys and along the creek bed out my window. In one place, men were fishing in a stream; in another, an old man was riding a bike following his dog down a dirt road, and some guy was peeing along the railroad tracks. The church spires in the villages we passed became more onion-shaped and colorful, though they were surrounded mostly by gray shacks. We'd stop at a remote train stop, and the conductor would blow his whistle and a man standing outside in uniform would salute. You could see his breath in the cold morning air. Chickens clucked nearby, unimpeded by an old wire fence.

A group of men got on, carrying 1.5 litre bottles of beer and sporting fantastic mullets, followed by some women with the same haircut. Everyone had mullets! And the language was vastly different now, far more foreign and strange. We continued on, and the smell of beer was in the air, at 10 AM, and the people got louder.

As we approached Prague, the sun started to come out and the mountains turned into rolling hills again, but this time everything felt so different, much more wild. We wound our way down to the city, and before you knew it, there we were, in the heart of what was about to become one of my favorite cities in the world.

Prague is different from other European cities because it is still there. Something most people don't like to think about is that many ancient European cities were basically leveled in WWII, so what you see are the attempts to salvage what was left. Prague is very well preserved, with its historic center listed as a UNESCO World Heritage site. In fact, it is the sixth most-visited city in Europe.

When I arrived, I had no idea where my hostel was. I had a street address, and a map, but the map had abbreviated common Czech words. It would be like if you didn't speak English and you were looking at a map trying to find the Boulevard of the Allies in Pittsburgh, and the map said, "Blvd. Allies". You'd probably end up in Bellevue. Yeah, that was me.

Speaking of Pittsburgh, people in the Czech Republic are Pittsburgh Penguins fans! Two people mentioned this to me when they found out I was from Pittsburgh. (On the front cover of the sports section was a story about Jaromir Jagr.)

So I wandered around Prague, staring with open eyes at every building, every stone wall, every church, every museum and concert hall, with a week's worth of stuff strapped to my back. The things I saw will stay with me for a long time.

The Castle:







History was all around. An exhibit of photos and interviews of people from the communist era was running in the castle square, and I walked around reading their stories. Also nearby was a tribute to the incredible number of Jews from Prague who perished in the Holocaust. It was chilling.

TVs in store windows were showing clips of parties in the streets of Berlin. The Czech newspaper stands showed photos of celebrations and concerts around Eastern and Central Europe. Posters in the bus shelters and train stations spoofed hammers and sickles, or they showed photos of crowds cheering with the giant date "1989" written above them.

And then it hit me. Here I was, in Eastern Europe on the 20th anniversary of the Fall of the Berlin Wall.

There were concerts going on in Prague to commemorate the 20th anniversary of the Velvet Revolution, which was just days away. Again, I just happened to be in Prague. Unbelievable. There was a festival in the main square, so I went down there to check it out.

Potato pancakes, sausages, bratwursts, Czech ham, hot mead, hot wine, Pilsner Urquell beer (the first pilsner, named after Pilsen, Czech Republic), and ALL OF IT WAS SO CHEAP. The Czech Republic isn't on the Euro yet, so things cost me pennies. I could eat a fire-cooked bratwurst for $1.50 US. And it was the best I've ever had.

The nightlife in Prague is legendary. I met a couple people at the hostel. I stayed the night and spent the next day walking around in Prague too. The Jewish Quarter, the riverfront, the Lesser Town. You easily need two days to do it all. Again, I wish I had all my pictures, but these are some: