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this post was submitted on 19 Dec 2023
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I went to Austria for skying, flew to Innsbruck and two days later caught the train to go to the ski resort.
That train was basically an intercity train (which even stopped at the little town from where a pretty regular commuter could be caught to the little ski resort) ... which just so happen to be coming from some city in Switzerland and would end in some city in Germany.
So I sit down in one of those places with 2x2 seats and a table in the middle. A couple of guys also seat down there and eventually we starting chatting.
It turns one of those guys was an Italian surf promoter, who had actually been to my country (Portugal) as part of surf events in Ericeira (big surf place nowadays thanks to the almost unique massive tube waves it gets at certain times in the year).
The guy did not spoke Portuguese but could speak several other languages. We ended up having a one hour or so conversation and as my German was a bit so-so (and, let's be honest, because it just felt cool to do so), we ended up doing with in the several languages we had in common - German, Spanish, Italian, English and French - just sort of jumping from language to language as we couldn't remember a word in one so used a different one or because the 3rd guy only spoke English and German so we had to switch to one of those when including him.
Coming from a very peripheral country in Europe - Portugal borders only Spain, and if you travel about 1000km in Spain, you get to the only other country it has a land border with, France, and then it takes another 1000km or so of France to get to the rest of Europe - the whole "absolutelly regular train that just happens to cross 3 countries" and casually chatting with somebody and using various languages when they happen to be convenient, thing was the first time I really felt a hint of what it is to just normally be European in Europe.
Fun stories like this remind me why my country (UK) just never feels connected to Europe. We've got this amazing continent on our doorstep but the poor state of our language education prevents many from feeling comfortable to explore it. I would love to share a story like this.
Yeah, I was living in the UK at the time and in that sense it feels almost as peripheral when it comes to Europe as Portugal.
Living in the UK actually made this feeling in that train in Austria more intense for me because I was actually living in an European country other than my homeland but it still didn't feel much closer to the rest of Europe than in Portugal, though I did jump on the Eurotunnel Express once in London for a couple of days in Paris, which was nice and is definitelly beyond what can be done in Portugal (were international train connections abroad are so bad that for example Lisbon - Barcellona is at least half a day, probably more).
Then again there is a little extra distancing in the UK because English being the lingua franca of this age, Britons can seldom speak any other language, and it's not at all the same thing when you're somewhere to use it as it is being able to speak the same language as the locals. (Mind you, I suspect I wouldn't get the same feeling in Eastern Europe as in that experience in Austria, simply because I cannot speak any language at all from those language branches, except for Romanian which is a Latin language so I can more easilly guess the meaning of words).