On the Plane to Ukraine

An hour into the plane ride and I'm already feeling my travel bug jitter again.

On the way in, I picked up an "El Pais" - the Spain equivalent to the New York Times - and found my seat next to an elderly German couple who appeared flustered with the seatback TV screen. "Emmm...." the woman next to me groaned, then gestured at me desperately and pointed at her tv screen. Apparently, her entertainment system's version of Sex and the City was playing in English, with Arabic subtitles. Neither language was doing much for her.

We fiddled with hand gestures and buttons, trying to fix it to no avail. My German is non-existant, and her English was just as bad. About five minutes in, I had a crazy thought - what if they speak Spanish? "Hablas Espanol?" I asked them , skeptically. "SI!" she answered back with an enthusiastic sigh of relief, and suddenly a whole new world was opened up between us.

We figured out the whole subtitle mess, and ended up having a long conversation about how she and her husband were visiting San Fransisco from Munich, and were on their way now to Italy. They taught me a few words in German, (which will be good to remember for next week in Hamburg...) and I taught them how to say "thank you for your help" in English. By the time drink service had come around, I was feeling thouroughly proud of myself.

Running with this culturally savvy momentum, I decided to be ambitious and try out the plane's "learn to speak Russian" program on my seatback TV. I got past "please", "thank you", "good bye" and "I love you" with some sense of accomplishment... but then the game moved to level 2 and sentences like "Excuse me, can you please take a picture of me?" popped up, and I gave up. I couldn't even move my mouth to prounounce half the words, nonetheless distinguish between each of the syllables.

Looks like I'll be sticking to Spanish, and leave the Russian to Mariya. Wish me luck!