Day One, in Which the Narrator Arrives

Writing about my experiences abroad is a constant struggle to avoid meandering, uninteresting ruminations about minutiae. The audience (let's assume there is one [humor me (please)]) doesn't care about the way Lufthansa's airplane's tray tables are latched or how toilets flush in Europe. (Do they?)

Having said that, experiences abroad are a collection of trivial, individually insignificant moments that coalesce into a transformative experience one can use to bore people at parties later on in life. Also, you can overpronounce foreign words.

I arrived via Frankfurt and, after a prolonged ballet involving luggage and orientation and introductions--the primary outcome of which is to make me forget the person's name less than a second after I hear it--there was time for a healthy meal at a Czech pub. Our choice of drink ran the gamut from "large beer" to "very large beer." Over a gently steaming plate of boiled potatoes and chicken fillet, I talked with a my new Czech friends about Hannah Arendt, stereotypes of Americans, residual resentment of communist ideology, American music from the 80s, and a few other things that got stuck somewhere in the barbed spines of the language barrier and bled to death between clusters of consonants and accent marks. Slowly.

Crashed early, drained by 20 hours of continuous travel.

New Vocab: Absolutely nothing. Tried to learn please and thank you, only succeeded in enunciating my own idiocy.