CrossBluePerchance

Are you saying that all English speaking countries have the same culture? Have you been to Australia? For that matter,have you been to the both the Northern and Southern United States? Even within countries, cultural norms can be very different. What an interesting thread this is.

Yes, Yes, and Yes. (As to the US, I've been to about 40 states on last count....only 17 less than Obama. :D )

I hope it is there now, as I don’t remember it as a popular food before.

 

Happy upcoming birthday!

Thank you on both counts!! :D

Before I got to Serbia I was quite excited by the challenge of visiting a country whose alphabet I couldn't read and when I got there I discovered they had swapped out most of their signs for the Latin alphabet:') and where there was Cyrillic it had a Latin translation;p. All that aside it was still a wonderful (if not nearly as challenging) road trip nonetheless;).

If I live long enough, (I'll be 76 in three weeks), we're intending/hoping to go to Ukraine, (mainly by train), next Spring......at least we (now) know how to look for hummus. :D

:')Now that must be a hell of a story;p You really do like getting out of your comfort zone. ;)

Here's an Oz one, later that same year, up around Rum Jungle, that I posted on another site:

Hitched a ride south from Darwin, late 1963, in a cattle transport with nothing but a dead steer in one of the trailers.

 

Going down the only paved road, and off to the left we see a cloud of dust from a car barreling towards the highway.

 

We're the only (other) vehicle on the road and the car swerves onto the pavement and merges right in front of us.

 

Truck driver says "It's old (whatever his name was) and he's asleep"......so he edges the transport forward and bumps the car...not lightly.

 

Car driver's arms fly up in the air.......he's awake NOW!

There are fun & laughs everywhere. :D

I farewelled an aunty back in the early eighties and that was the case, changed soon after that.

Twenty years before then it was great......real farewells.....now ship sailings are only a few steps up from airports......sad to see it change like that.

It was probably

 

Хумус [emoji6]

 

I’m not a Bulgarian, but my native language uses Cyrillic.

 

«m» in Cyrillic is an equivalent of “t” in Latin alphabet based languages

Curses, thwarted by a lower case 'm'. :D (I'm sure you're correct.)

Oh, in Veliko Tarnovo we got chatting to a guy in a take out shawarma outlet...his English was impeccable.....learned from TV, he claimed. (He also said he learned Korean the same way....wow!)

By the way, my tours we’re not just comprised of Americans. There were Australians, Canadians, British and people of other Nationalities who chose to take an English speaking tour.

:D:D That's kinda like someone from Berlin saying "There weren't just Germans, there were Austrians too".

Air travel was definitely for the rich back then.

Ship departures were a lot more fun...streamers tossed from the rails were tied to the dock.....and the "All Visitors Ashore" announcement was repeated over the P.A. until the tugs started moving the ship. Those were the days!

I think my comfort zone ends when I can no longer recognize the alphabet... .

Finding Hummus in Bulgaria was initially a problem...until we learned to look for Xymyc on the top of the tub. :D

CrossBluePurchance, thanks for sharing the train stories. Love to read about them, but will pass on the experience..

Did I mention being detained for a day, initially at machine gun point, in Basra, Iraq, not too long before the train ride? ;)

At one point, as the old train was climbing to higher altitudes along the windy track, it was possible to jump off, walk ahead a little, wait for the train to catch up and jump back on...I was younger then.

Don't ask about the 'washroom facilities' though.

Longest I ever did was in early 1963, Melbourne to Southampton, on the ~25,000 GT Northern Star across the Pacific, about 6 weeks as I recall.

Of course it wasn't considered 'cruising' back then, it was just using a ship to get from A to B. Six weeks of food and accommodation and still way cheaper than flying.

We. However, I have been eying Pullmantur so I appreciate the feedback..

Unfortunately for many Pullmantur aficionados it appears they will no longer be operating their transatlantics to Europe from the Caribbean and back....a big disappointment for us.

Although having visited a half-dozen or so sub-Saharan African countries, I've unfortunately never commuted by local bus......although I have seen passengers hanging out the doors. ;)

I did, however, ride this train in 1963 not long before my 21st birthday, (see comments below the blog article):

http://www.kathmanduandbeyond.com/train-zahedan-iran-quetta-pakistan/

took about 28 hours to cover 200 miles along the Afghan/Pakistan border IIRC.

Fear of safety - I see a lot of people hesitant to move outside their comfort zone because of fear. Not just their personal safety, but also due to being self-conscious.

If possible we try and move inter-city on ancient slow local trains......Romania, Bulgaria, Poland, wherever........it's great to sit in a full eight seat old fashioned compartment with locals continually boarding and disembarking.

You don't need to know the language(s).....a smile, a nod, and the tacit understanding that you'll squeeze over a little bit in your seat if necessary. One soon becomes accepted as part of the group in that compartment. It's GREAT!

I am going to narrow those down to the travelers that butt in and travel as tight knit groups. Watching footage of their country, this also happens. They don't think of it as rude or insensitive, it is how they live at home..

One of the many reasons we love Pullmantur......there are times when it seems as if the entire village, (the local priest included), is doing a communal transatlantic.............they all want to sit at the same table, and it's interesting to observe/note the village hierarchy which doesn't dissolve because they're on holiday.

On one trip a group of about twenty began singing.....we joined in for the (simple) chorus, and received smiles of acknowledgement.

This is why we travel...to build 'connections', however short lived they may be.

Otherwise...why bother.

. But I'd argue that you're describing something different: "vacation" (or possibly "tourism") not "travel".

+1 A few years back we were talking to a local boutique owner who stated that she had "Traveled all over the world"......pretty much turned out to be a few Caribbean all-inclusives.

But then I have no patience for those same travelers coming back from their trips and telling me all the things that are done wrong in XX country.....

...and spending all their time in restaurants, or in buses & cabs, surrounded by other tourists, and having virtually no contact at all with the countries they are purportedly visiting.

Oh yes, fluency is certainly not required.

I recall, way back when, the late Louis Armstrong was asked how he managed to communicate in all the countries he performed......his reply was "I'm the pointingest cat you ever did see!"

Then stop taking tours and excursions; learn enough of the language to get by, and then drive or take public transit around on your own.

You don't even have to be fluent in any language......we got up early one morning in Sofia, Bulgaria, and walked, in the pre-dawn pitch darkness, towards the general direction of the train station, without actually knowing where it was.

Encountered a lady walking her dog...she had no English, we had no Bulgarian....after being unable to ask directions or convey our intent, my wife mimed pulling a steam whistle and said "Toot Toot"

Instant communication....with hand signals she provided perfect instructions and we were on our way. There's always common ground!

How many of you have ever met Rick Steves in person and had a conversation with him ?......We have...not what we expected at all...hmmmm.

What did you expect?

The sensible approach is not to eat in the buffet where tongs, plates, and food has been handled by other passengers. If you are daft enough to eat there, don't use your fingers to eat anything.

And certainly don't eat anything that has been touched by the crew because........oh, wait...

Comprehensive tests not that long ago revealed a lot of hand sanitisers are ineffective, but when they are germ killing they are also potentially harmful. Using it strips away out natural defences and is making us vulnerable to mutating bacteria. The same problem can be seen with more antibiotic resistant bacteria plaguing health systems.

 

I always wash my hands thoroughly with soap and warm water. I therefore see little need to use hand sanitiser every time I walk down a public corridor. Take Kings Court for example: no fewer than 4 sanitiser stations/personnel the length of that area. Once on QM2 I was told to sanitise 3 times in under 90 seconds. It was overkill.

+1 (or more)

I think it was the rain that went on for 40 days and nights - certainly the later part of the “cruise” enjoyed better weather, given the several flights of certain passengers before one came back with - wasn’t it a twig from an olive branch? This, of course, suggests that either some parts of the surface of the earth had not been inundated at all, or that the flood had lasted so very long that the first parts to dry out were dry long enough for a leafy twig to be available ..... hmmmm.

I've found fossilized sea life items atop an escarpment in the middle of Saudi Arabia......so ya never know.

I thought that one was 40 years?:confused:

Naah, not Moses, JC in the Judaean Desert. Similar but different. ;)

I thought it was 40 nights.:confused:

.

Naah, that was the Desert Safari on foot. ;)

Noah's Ark was about six months, IIRC.

Who is Red Skelton ?

Was.