| So you've seen my Toilets of the World and other travel-related web pages, and you wonder how you, too, can enjoy such plush accomodations? Here's how to find the places where I've gone, sometimes more than once, and lived to tell about it. |
| Use at your own risk. Not responsible for financial loss incurred, mental anguish suffered, or diseases contracted. Your mileage may vary. Discontinue use in case of dizziness, blurred vision, inability to urinate, or inability to stop urinating. |
Read about where you're going. Attempt to prepare yourself. Get something like a Lonely Planet or Rough Guide book. If you need to sort out local minibus schedules in Syria, including how to pay for your ticket (pay the driver's assistant) and how much it will probably cost (next to nothing), they'll do the trick.
Of all the places I've gone, the most dangerous in several ways is the U.S.A. Really. The shuffling zombie armies of vagrants in Atlanta are creepy and threatening, and Washington D.C. is dangerous in multiple ways at once.
At the very least, a basic greeting and the local words for "Please" and "Thank you". And then there are:
On the topic of languages, there is a wonderful passage in the "Languages of the World" article in Encyclopedia Britannica, in the section about Latin-based languages:
Many Romance dialects have virtually ceased to be spoken in the past century. Of these, Dalmatian is the most striking, its last known speaker, one Antonio Udina, having been blown up by a land mine in 1898. He was the main source of knowledge for his parent's dialect (that of the island of Veglia, or Krk), though he was hardly an ideal informant: Vegliot Dalmatian was not his native language, and he had learned it only from listening to his parents' private conversations. Moreover, he had not spoken the language for 20 years at the time he acted as an informant, and he was deaf and toothless as well.
Americans really need to learn what a bidet is before venturing overseas. Read this explanation!
All sorts of maps of Europe and west Asia: http://www.euratlas.com/
If you're not bored yet, you might be interested in (or at least tolerate):
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| © Bob Cromwell Jul 2009. Created with /bin/vi and ImageMagick, hosted on OpenBSD with Apache. Root password available here, privacy policy here. |
