my journey across the pond.

I left Indianapolis, IN at 12:30 pm on Tuesday the 8th of May. Twenty eight hours later, I set my huge, overstuffed, 50lb bag down in my dorm room at Paderno del Grappa. My journey here consisted of planes, trains, and buses- whew! I flew from Indianapolis to JFK in New York then to Madrid and finally to Venice. For the purpose of this blog post, I am supposed to discuss the intercultural communication incidents that may have occurred during my travels. I can for sure say that MANY occurred. My first intercultural experience happened in JFK. When I was trying to get from one terminal to another, I heard so many different languages- I already felt like I was in another world. On my flight to Madrid, I was at first concerned when the flight staff were speaking mainly Spanish. As I mentioned before, I actually do speak Spanish well enough to get around. My brain turned on (traveling tends to make me tired, therefore my brain shuts off) and I asked for cream and sugar with my coffee. First intercultural communication experience= success.

After switching flights and making it to Venice, I heard my first words of Italian and it really hit me- I'm in Italy! After that realization was the fleeting thought of "Crap........I can't speak Italian." My first encounter with the language barrier resulted in me doing wild gestures to find out where the bus was to pick us up, and sticking my nose in my Italian phrase book like the tourist that I am. Being a communications major, it really bothered me that I couldn't speak the language. I wanted to make small talk, to know the stories of the people that were helping me get to my final destination of Paderno. All in all, my travel to Paderno went extremely smoothly. After the bus incident, we (myself and the other RAs) made it to the train station, got on the train, then got a bus, and made it to Paderno. I have now been in Italy one week, and the only other intercultural communication fail I have had happened in my day trip to Venice last weekend. I would like to say that I really do consider myself a traveler- I have been to 15+ countries, which I consider to be a fairly good amount.

On the train to Venice, I bought a large bottle of water to drink knowing that I would get dehydrated walking around Venice all day. By the time I got there, I really, really had to go. As my group of friends were walking down the tiny streets of Venice (more like foot paths really) I was looking for the usual symbol for restroom, the male and female figures. After a good half an hour of searching, I stopped at a restaurant and asked, "Bano???" The waiter pointed to a sign nearly directly above my head that had a "WC" on it. I was really frustrated and said "no, bano!" At that point I REALLY had to go though, so I went down the narrow sidestreet to where the sign pointed. Lo and behold, it was a bathroom. Even though it wasn't the type of communication that is typically thought of (such as speaking or the language barrier) I did have intercultural communication issues because I wasn't aware of the meaning of the WC sign. I am quickly learning that in order to not be a nervous wreck when traveling in a country that is speaking a language I do not know (or have signs I don't recognize) that I must realize communication errors will happen, and I just have to roll with the punches. Until next time, ciao!