[PRCo] Re: A Great Brussels Museum Video

[Derrick Brashear]

On Mon, Oct 4, 2010 at 4:41 PM, Fred Schneider <fwschneider at comcast.net> wrote:
> Thanks for the tip.   I didn't see if before.   I particularly liked the 8th archived video of them rerailing an errant Hague articulated PCC.  Yes ... PCC.   Those red 3000s used trucks from the older scrapped single-unit PCC cars.
>
> I went to Lisbon with a now deceased man from Baltimore.   It took a while for him to catch on that a lot of Europeans spoke and understood English even though they might now which to acknowledge that skill.   While he was astonished at and never ceased to explain to others back home that the Central Station information clerks in the Hague in Holland all spoke four or five languages (Flemish, English, German, French and one other rotating language), it never quite sunk into the poor man that English was the second language of choice in those smaller (minority language countries) until we got to Lisbon on one trip.  And then it bit him in the ass.
>
> We were riding back from a private tour of the car shops.   The car was being run by a young lady who was a student operator.   Dick was making a bad mistake.   He just could not refrain from telling me what he thought of her performance based, of course, on his prior years of experience as an operator for Baltimore Transit Co.   I kept trying to signal him to shut up.   I was getting no where.  I eventually dragged up finger across my throat like a knife.   That didn't work.   I finally looked at him and said, "Shut your f--king mouth."   Well, we stopped.   The instructor got off the car to make a phone call.  The student operator turned around.   She smiled at me.  Then she looked at Dick and in most clear and frosty English, said to Dick, "Does by performance meet your lofty expectations sir?"   You could have scraped him off the floor of the car.   Perhaps that is why the next day he was in a London hospital suffering from a stroke?   He did learn his lesson.   Not ever!
>  yone in Lisbon speaks only Portuguese and Spanish isn't always the second language.

We stepped onto the Stockholm T-bana by KTH (Royal Institute of
Technology is the approximate translation) to head further into the
city for dinner. 2 americans and 6 swedes. A man traveling with two
children also stepped in, and in getting to the seats he stepped on
the toes of one of our group; His son, maybe 5 or so, said something
in swedish. Hearing the conversation which to that point was only
people with accents (us, americans and one of the swedes speaking
english with a german accent because he'd spent much of his younger
years in esslingen) he apologized in english. We got a translation
later from one of the swedes who after hearing it stayed silent until
they left. "Yeah dad! You show those americans!"

In spite of speaking about 3 words of Czech, we did well. I have
advice on how to travel in non-third-world areas where you don't speak
the language, which I will share some other time when we are not all
variously time- and life-stressed.