Europe Travel Tips from Neville Millen
Neville Millen has been working up a travelogue of his two-month trip, and took some time out to drop some tips on Europe travel in general.
On not bothering to learn the language
"Don't bother to learn languages, there is always someone who speaks English better than you and me. Look for a young stylish person with a brief-case or business type and there you have the instant interpreter. You just need phrasebooks with everyday words and you can get by. There was always someone in the hotels we stayed at who spoke good clear English, and if they didn't, sign language and some improvisation always got us through."
Half right, and more right than it was. English has spread further across Europe in the years since, and a phone will translate a menu or a sign by pointing a camera at it, which no phrasebook ever did.
The half he had wrong: learning six words is not about getting by, it is about how you are treated. Hello, please, thank you, sorry, excuse me, and the number two. That is fifteen minutes of effort and it changes every interaction you have in France in particular. Download the offline language pack before you go, since the moment you need translation is the moment you have no data.
On rail strikes, which have not gone anywhere
The sourest part of his trip was a French rail strike that stranded him between Barcelona and Avignon, and the argument that followed with a conductor in Italy about a date he had altered on his paper pass. He was facing a hundred euro fine plus the fare, and he refused to pay it.
Two things worth pulling out of that.
Strikes are still a normal feature of French and Italian rail, usually announced days ahead, and usually running a reduced timetable rather than nothing. Check the operator's site before a travel day in either country, and build a spare day into any route where missing a connection means missing a flight.
The paper-pass problem is gone. Passes live in the Rail Planner app now, and you activate a travel day in the app. There is nothing to write on and nothing to alter, so the entire category of argument he had with that conductor no longer exists. Whether the replacement is better is a matter of taste, but nobody gets fined for changing an 11 to a 16 any more.
And the rant
The remainder of the letter is Neville on the daily indignities of travel: smoking, litter, begging, and above all people shouting into mobile phones in train carriages and internet cafes. The internet cafes have gone. The rest of it he would recognise instantly.
He was right that it is part of the deal. "In the fullness of time," he wrote, these are "the essential ingredients of quality experiential travel." Which is a generous way of describing a man being driven mad in a railway carriage.
Posted 27 June 2003 by Ant in Eurail Blog Archives · updated by Chris