Day 42 Ljubljana, Slovenia

Wifi Hotspots in Maribor

Outside the Maribor train station is a billboard with a map showing all of the City's wifi hot spots. If a relatively poor country like Slovenia can do this, why can't we in the States? Again, I go back to an earlier blog: The best thing Obama could do to stimulate the economy and help people in need is to give them a notebook computer and free wifi access, an observation underscored by my last month's AT&T bill, almost a whopping $1,000. Other than a text or two a day, I seldom use my phone. It's the features, like international roaming, that AT&T says will save me money, that are costing an arm and a leg. I'm turning them off. Another interesting price point comparison. My two hour train ride to Ljubljana cost 10 Euro - views alone were worth at least ten times that. The one hour ride from Cologne to Frankfurt cost 70 Euro. What gives here? On that score, you might want to rethink buying a Europass if some of your travels are in Eastern Europe, where public transportation is dirt cheap.

Slovenians wanting to talk to their neighbors in Italy, Hungary, Austria, and Croatia could learn their neighbors' languages but easier is to speak English, the lingua franca, of all these countries. On the bus in Austria, a couple of guest workers from different countries were trying to communicate with each other in broken German. When they couldn't think of a word, they resorted to English, although they knew even less English than German. When I lived in Frankfurt, the highbrow Der Spiegel used latinized words instead of their German counterparts. The lowbrow Frankfurter Rundschau stuck to German. That's changed. Latinized words or simply English words are now everywhere. In German, they write "Information" instead of Auskunft or "Television" instead of Fernseh. In stores, the internationally branded products are, for the most part, in English. On TV, in Slovenia, American programs and movies are in English with Slovene subtitles. Ads are a blend of English and the indigenous languages. My favorite in Germany: "Coole Drink fur alle Stunden (cool drink for all hours)," "Coole" is the phoenetic pronounciation for the German word kuhle and "Drink" is English for Getrankt, and the rest gratuitously is in German. Anglicization is on the march.