Greetings.

In article , Paul Corfield
wrote:
How did you cope with the language? How readily is English recognised /
spoken?

Apart from my girlfriend and her friends, the locals I interacted with
spoke little or no English. Even the ones working in tourist spots (ticket
sellers at museums, food vendors near the Kremlin and Red Square, sales
clerks at GUM, waitresses at touristy restaurants, etc.) spoke no English
whatsoever, or at best only a few canned phrases. When ordering tickets,
I'd have to hold up the necessary number of fingers, and when ordering food
and drinks, I'd have to point to the item I wanted in the display case or
on the bilingual menu. Of course, I didn't really have that much
interaction with the locals as I was with my girlfriend most of the time;
it could be that my experiences are a statistical anomaly. In most other
Eastern European cities I've been to (St. Petersburg, Riga, Sofia, Varna,
Budapest, Prague) I found English (and German) more widely understood.

Regards,
Tristan

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