Cringes

I have to stop reading this girl's blog.

Under "10 things I have learned the hard way in Barcelona"

"4. Catalan is nothing like Spanish. I can’t understand the television in catalan, I can’t read signs and I especially can’t understand when an old man on the metro starts a conversation with me in Catalan. Simply say that you don’t speak Catalan. Or they will keep speaking, like this old man did, for the entire metro ride."

"8. This is weird but I realized today that dogs speak/listen in Spanish here. So does this mean that if my dog, Shanti, met a Spanish dog, they would communicate differently? Do their barks have accents?"

The first one just makes me sad for the poor old man. And different languages = different languages. Catalan is actually pretty similar to Spanish considering that it's a DIFFERENT language. The second one just hurts. I thought that was a joke.

A long rant about how hard it is to travel (which includes lots of mistakes that, yes, could happen to anyone - but the fact that they ALL happened to you should say something about your fact checking ability) includes: "We then get off the plane, find the bus and realize that we booked the opposite tickets for the bus. We booked from Brussels to Charleroi on Friday and Charleroi to Brussels on Sunday. Luckily, the lady at the ticket counter was nice. However, standing in the line that was 30 minutes didn’t make us too happy. Standing in the line gave me a little bit of culture shock, simply because everyone around us was speaking French and German and Flemish, all three languages that I am not familiar with at all. It was definitely intimidating considering we had no way to communicate at all." You made a pretty major mistake booking the ticket. They're nice enough to change it for you for free, but it didn't make you too happy to wait in line so they could do so? And you get culture shock because people around you are speaking other languages, and you 'can't communicate'? You're in Belgium. I guarantee you anyone you're going to want to talk to speaks English.

She does have some good posts and observations too. That, and the fact that she's in a very similar situation to the one I was in last semester, and because I'm too lazy to remove her from my feed, are why I keep reading. But the cringes are just too many and close together.