When I moved from the U.S. to the Czech Republic in 2008, I found that things that would have been
totally easy for me to handle in the U.S. were suddenly not so easy to handle.
And I found that things that would have been basically non-issues in the U.S.,
suddenly became issues.
Hey everyone! I'm Dana and you're watching Wanted Adventure Living Abroad.
When I first moved to Prague I could speak a little bit of Czech, but mostly stuff like
where's the train station and nice to meet you.
So when I was showering one day and the water cut off suddenly halfway through,
I had no idea why.
Turns out there had been information posted about it down by the mailboxes in my apartment building.
But I had not been able to read it.
Had I been in the U.S. that would not have been a problem.
I could have read the information.
And known that the water was going to be turned off.
Or when my hot water heater stopped working over Christmas.
In the U.S. I would have simply called the landlord or whoever I was supposed to call
if the landlord was unavailable because of the holidays and gotten it sorted out.
That, I found, gets a little more difficult if you don't speak very much of the language
of the country that you're in.
How that turned out, by the way, is that I called the landlord first, they didn't pick
up, so then I called the other number that I had been given and yay someone picked up,
but of course they were speaking Czech.
Hmmmm what to do?
Get creative with it.
I didn't know very much Czech, but I did know the Czech word for water, voda, and I
knew the Czech word for winter, Zima.
So after saying hello to the person on the other end of the line, I literally said two words.
Voda zima. And then I repeated it for good measure. Voda zima. And I felt ridiculous.
As far as I knew the woman on the other end of the line had picked up the phone to hear
me saying hello and then "water winter, water winter."
What I didn't know at that point was that lucky for me in Czech the word for winter
is also the word for cold.
So while I thought that I was saying water winter, I was in fact also saying water cold.
So that was very fortuitous.
She took my information and then said some things to me in Czech and then the phone call was over.
I hung up the phone hoping that someone would be coming to my apartment to fix the hot water
heater, but not actually having any idea if that was the case.
And when that might happen. And I didn't really have anywhere else to go.
Of course if I really had to I could have gone and checked myself into a hotel, but
then I wouldn't be at the apartment when...or if...or when...hopefully when the repair person
arrived to fix the heater.
So I just sat there in my winter jacket waiting to see what would happen next.
I was very happy when just a few hours later the doorbell rang and, yay, someone was there to fix it.
He came into the apartment, went to the hot water heater, and all of, I think, 5 minutes
later at the most, he was done and gone, and I once more had warm water.
So the story had a successful ending.
Everything ended up being resolved and okay within just a few hours.
But still I realized that sometimes things that would have been pretty easy for me to
resolve back in the U.S., suddenly became a little bit bigger challenges for me to figure
out what to do about in a new country.
One more example: getting a package from the post office.
You come home, you find a letter in your mailbox saying that the mail carrier had tried to
drop off a package, but you weren't home, so now the package is waiting for you at some
other location for you to go pick up.
Might not have been such a big deal, but this little piece of paper that I got was covered
in writing in a language that I could barely read.
And on this piece of paper there were all kinds of instructions about what I needed
to do to pick up the package and which specific hours I could go to get it, but my Czech skills
were only good enough that I could look at the paper and figure out that written on this
paper were instructions that I could not read.
So what probably would have been a pretty easy task for me to do back in the U.S. suddenly
became something that I struggled to figure out.
And just forget about the time that my package got stuck in customs and I had to go pick
it up from there. Then I was really lost.
So my question for you is: have you ever experienced something in a new city or a new country
or while on vacation somewhere that you think would have been easy for you to sort out at
home but was suddenly a struggle in this new location?
Please let me know in the comments below. Thanks so much for watching.
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So what I...
She took my information and then said some things to Czech...in Czech to me!
When I moved from the U.S. to the Czech Republic in 2008 I found that things would have been...what?
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