We've had two email questions about our planning efforts. Here are my almost verbatim replies.
Q1: Are you couchsurfing, airbnbing?
Q1: Are you couchsurfing, airbnbing?
SL has mapped out (literally) possible hotels - no CS or ABB - for all of Greece and Albania, Montenegro, and most of Bosnia. So far nothing has caused us to change our long time practice and new slogan: We don't book, we look. ;-)
However, for two reasons we have decided to contact some CSers along the route. One, they may have helpful on-the-ground information, and two, it may be nice to have cup of coffee/chat with a local in some places we visit.
Q2: Can you get by with English in all these places?
I'm guessing that many hotel managers will know basic English; and that bus drivers, taxi drivers, and ticket sellers will know little or no English. Therefore we'll need to know how to properly pronounce our destination city or town. ;-) And knowing how to say "please stop right now" may come in handy along with "I am a vegetarian".
We are learning to transliterate Greek letters into Roman letters and getting pretty good at place names and things bus schedule related. And soon will do the same for Cyrillic.
Serbia, Romania, and Bulgaria have pretty good English versions of their national rail system's websites. And many bus lines have good English websites.
Romanian is a Romance language and it looks like we'll be able to get a lot of meaning from written Romanian, be unable to understand only a few spoken words as it sounds quite unlike Spanish or Italian, and be able to utter some heavily accented words and phrases.
Sounds like a lot of fun to me. ;-)
