Don't be afraid to travel where you don't speak the language

Travel where you don’t speak the language

If you haven’t recently traveled to a place where you don’t speak the language, you’d likely be surprised how easy it can be these days.
First, it’s amazing to see how well pantomime works.  When we were in Panama, and I couldn’t remember the word for ice (kept coming up with the word for “sky” instead), my mom held an imaginary glass in the air and dropped 2 imaginary ice cubes in it, and said “clink, clink” and we got what we wanted.

Despite that, it’s very helpful to memorize a few words before going.  Learn to say “good morning” or “hello” or other greetings.  Learn how to ask where the bathroom is, and learn the words for any allergy you have so you can avoid those foods.

Another thing that has helped me several times is this book, Point It.  If you click that link, sometimes you have to search for it again on Amazon as it sometimes has multiple listings for the different versions (but they’re pretty much the same, so it doesn’t matter which version you get). 

This tiny pocket-able book has multiple pages on it with great pictures of different foods, animals, health supplies, stores, clothing, etc. on it, so you can just point at things.  If you don’t know what meat is in the dish you are looking at, open to the animals’ page.  Want to know what fruits or vegetables are in what you are eating? Allergic to oranges, just point it out.  This has been very helpful to me particularly with respect to food in other countries.  There is an app for it too, but it is not very good,  this pocket-sized book is much better.

Another thing to do is to take a couple of business cards from where you are staying.  They have the hostel/hotels address in the local language, so you can show them to people if you can’t find your way, or are taking a cab.  Make sure your room number is not written on them (so you probably can’t use the key cardholder for this).

 
Finally, have an app on your phone for translations.  For example, google translate allows you to aim your camera on the foreign text and it converts it on the screen.  Yeah, sometimes you are told that the gelato flavor you are contemplating is called “chocolate with damned” or “he mutinied” or something else similarly mystifying, but often the translations are good enough that you can minimally get the drift of how to get the pass for the train, or how to pay for parking.

Going to a country where you don’t understand the language is totally doable.  Just be prepared and you’ll do fine 🙂

Happy travels!