galaxyrise asked: Oh, and: did you pick up basic expressions in the language of places you stayed? Either preparing beforehand, or while you were there?
Yes and no. I’d be hard pressed to count in Arabic today, although I could at the very least identify Arabic numbers this time last year. Greetings and thankyou are easy to pick up and we used them fairly regularly.
In the first few months I took a fair bit of a pleasure out of developing very small vocabularies for the countries that we travelled through. But as time moved on and I grew accustomed to the rhythm of constant travel, I began to put less effort in. Unceasing travel is wearying. It wears you down and normalises the extraordinary. Languages, then, as interesting as they normally are to me, lost their sheen, and I grew content to take the path of least resistence - English.
