Language

So, it's definitely harder to get around in Vienna with my limited German than it was in Prague with no Czech whatsoever. Mainly because in Prague, everything is very tourist-oriented, and everyone knows English. I saw several cases where two parties of non-native-English-speakers used English to converse, because they had it in common. It also seems like the Czechs have always had to deal with the fact that they were a tiny country, and if they wanted to communicate with other Europeans, they had to use another language. In the late 19th and early 20th century, it was German (think Kafka: lived in Prague, wrote in German). After WWII, it was Russian. Now, it's English. Given the history, each shift makes sense. If people were annoyed at having to speak English, they certainly didn't show it. (Given Prague's history, I can also imagine that I would be fine with speaking English if it were the alternative to Russian or German).

Here in Vienna, too, there are plenty of accomodations made for us foreigners, especially at museums and tourist sites and lots of restaurants. But, it's a large, working capital city, and it doesn't really totally need tourists, so most things are just in German, and unless you ask otherwise, people expect you're going to be speaking it.

So last night I was pretty happy when I was successfully conducting a whole transaction at a cafe in poor but apparently good-enough German. We got some coffee, we got some water. A little later on, we also thought we'd get something sweet, but we didn't have anything specific in mind. So we picked, more or less at random, one of the deserts that looked like some kind of cake. I asked the waitress for that, and, apparently, what I ended up saying was something like "Can I have the assorted cake?". Because the answer was-- in English-- "Which one? we have chocolate, an orange torte, "... etc.

Alas.