It’s been a little over 6 months since I moved across the pond. I had a blast being unemployed for most of that time, as you can probably tell from all my previous travel posts 🙂 But now I’m settling back into being a real adult.
Did I do anything other than travel during my time off?
I took an intensive French class. I’m still terrible at French. As a native English speaker, there is not enough incentive to learn French, German, or Luxembourgish because most people in the city speak English as a second (or third or fourth or fifth!) language. Even if I attempt to speak French, I either leave the conversation not quite understanding everything that was said, or I end up slipping back into English. Thankfully, everyone is usually quite friendly, and they accommodate my lacking language skills. Here, English is the lingua franca where 47% of residents in the country and 70% of residents in the capital city are foreign nationals coming from 170 different countries.
I learned how to drive stick. In Europe, most people drive stick. If you want to rent a car, it’s at least twice as expensive to rent an automatic car than a manual car. And that’s if they even have an automatic available. I know like 4 people total in the US who own a manual car. Poor N had been responsible for driving both of us everywhere we went, until I rented a car for a week and asked him to teach me. That wasn’t fun either. I might have cried after stalling in the middle of an intersection and getting honked at by a bus driver… Aaanyway, it took me a good few days to get the hang of it, but now I’m capable of driving stick on the left as well! I still stall here and there, but at least I don’t freak out anymore.
Angela's Great Adventure 