Not knowing the local language can be a problem. Like when you eat
It was 2002. Four of us comprised a communications team, sent to Eastern Europe to talk with missionaries all over central Europe. Our team was all Americans, with one of us based in Budapest and three of us in St. Louis. Since everyone we would be talking with was American or spoke English, we were assured we would not have a language problem.
Right.
It was a packed schedule. In six days, we would be in Budapest, Bratislava, Prague, Dresden, Erfurt, Dresden again, Prague and Brno, and then a return for a final day in Budapest.
We flew into Budapest via Munich. Changing planes at 7 a.m. on a Saturday morning proved not to be a problem, because everything in the Munich airport was closed until 8. We didn’t experience a single language problem.
We made it through customs in Budapest without a question. The officials glanced at our passports, smiled, and waved us through. Our main contact (and driver) was American; he met us in baggage claim. Saturday night was a dinner with Americans and a server who spoke English. Sunday was church in the morning and trying to recover from jet lag the rest of the day. We left early Monday morning for an overnight stop in Prague and then on to Dresden in Germany.
And we had been told the truth about the language. Everyone we interviewed was either American or spoke fluent English. We had this language thing set. We thought.
What no one had talked about was the time in between the interviews. Like traveling, which we would be spending considerable time doing.
The Sudetenland (Image via Wikimedia)
When we left Prague for Germany, the map showed we would be driving through the Sudeten Mountains. If you know your history, you know that this region, once called the Sudetenland, played a critical role in the run-up to World War II. The mountains roughly formed a U-shape around the western end of Czechoslovakia. What the diplomats negotiating the break-up of the German and Austro-Hungarian empires in 1919 didn’t think mattered much was that the Sudetenland had a large German-speaking population. Large as in majority large.
In 1938, Hitler wanted it. Britain and France eventually agreed to cede the Sudetenland to Germany in the so-called Munich Agreement. No one asked Czechoslovakia for its opinion. Peace in our time! Hitler got it, and a few months later, to no one’s surprise, German troops occupied Prague and the rest of the country. After Hitler’s defeat, the Sudetenland was returned to the Czechs, except this time all ethnic Germans were expelled, even if their ancestors had been there for a thousand years or more.
The four of us talked about this as we entered the Sudeten Mountains. Soon, it was time for dinner, and we still had to get through German border control and reach Dresden, where we had overnight accommodations.
We stopped at a roadside restaurant in a village that was literally just off the two-lane highway. We walked in, and it was like a movie set. All conversation in the smoke-filled room stopped.
We entered through the bar, and it was packed with men. Silent men, staring at the four Americans. Clearly, this village wasn’t a tourist destination or used to seeing visitors from the United States. We didn’t sense hostility; it was more suspicion.
Our village resembled this one (Image by lur Ch. via Pexels)
A woman came up to us and said, “Eat, yes?” We eagerly nodded, smiling at finding someone who knew English. We didn’t know that “Eat, yes?” was her entire English vocabulary. She escorted us to a large adjacent room, clearly the main dining room, and seated us. The room could easily have accommodated 100 people. We were the only guests the entire time we were there. (Regular diners must have heard about the four strangers. They’d look in the room and decide to eat in the bar, which stayed packed while the dining room remained just us.)
Our server was a teenaged boy, who seemed friendly enough except he didn’t know English. He silently gave us menus, which were in two languages.
Czech and German.
None of us spoke either language. I became the food arbiter, because I stupidly mentioned I’d taken German in college more than 25 years before.
I scanned the menu. It was indecipherable to me, except for a single word I recognized.
Wienerschnitzel.
I ordered it. Another guy followed my lead. The other two decided to play a game of Czech dietary roulette and each pointed a finger at different dishes. The waiter looked at them with a surprised look on his face (never a good sign) but shrugged and nodded.
Our Wienerschnitzel dishes turned out to be outstanding. The other two stared at their plates; none of us could figure out what their food was. One dish looked like tripe. Maybe. But both dishes looked better than they tasted.
My comeuppance came with the coffee. Both the guy driving and I ordered after-dinner coffee because we had about four to five hours ahead of on the road, much of it in mountains, he was the driver, and I was the co-pilot with the map and flashlight. Coffee, we thought, would help keep us awake.
The waiter brought two demitasse cups of coffee. The small size turned out to be a blessing. What he brought was Turkish coffee. About half of the cup was the grounds, and the coffee itself could have been eaten with a fork. No cream or sugar, however; Sudeten Czechs like their coffee black and strong. And Turkish.
It did the trick, however. We stayed awake—wide awake—until we reached Dresden and found our bed-and-breakfast accommodations for the night. Interestingly enough, it was hosted by a doctor in his home. But he spoke English!
We also had walked into another bit of history. His large, stone-façade house had been built in 1906. The street had survived World War II intact; the famous Allied firebombing of Dresden had stopped about 100 yards north.
In between interviews in Dresden and a suburb, and the German city of Erfurt, we decided to take no more chances on language difficulties in restaurants. We’d learned our lesson.
We ate lunch at a McDonald’s.
Photo by Martin Fisch, Creative Commons, via Flickr. Post by Glynn Young.
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L.L. Barkat says
“…everything in the Munich airport was closed until 8. We didn’t experience a single language problem.” 🙂 This made me chuckle.
I loved hearing all the history bits along the way, Glynn. Thanks for the tour through time and place (and food adventure).