Before: Tools Of the Trade

One of the early considerations for whether or not a month in Lviv was feasible for us, was how I would fare not even knowing the alphabet. The trip will be our first personal travel outside of North America since we went to Ecuador - Amy was six and a half months pregnant at the time.

In the last year, work has brought me to Japan, to San Diego, and most recently to Munich. At least in Japan, I seemed to hit some kind of traveling stride. I studied my guide book, downloaded language podcasts, and was surprised to find my American colleagues looking in my direction when they didn't understand something they were hearing. This was an unusual experience for me at least in part because I am used to traveling with Amy.

During our trip to St. Chinian, I could mostly follow along in restaurants and vineyards but knew that Amy could get us out of any linguistic jams we might find ourselves in. We were both out of depth once we got to western Ireland, but there would usually be someone in the room (or in one memorable case, the road crew) who spoke English. In Ecuador, we were accounted for by our guide at all times - he read menus at every restaurant we stopped at in the Galapagos long after we'd realized that you could have fish grilled, fried, or both. We had been to Vancouver to start our bike trip last year, but the only non-native situation we really had to navigate was ordering food by the gram at the market.

I'm determined to carry some of my own verbal weight this trip, and being responsible for Axel several hours a day should be a good prod. I've armed my iPod with:

• Speakeasy Ukrainian


• WordPower Ukrainian


• Ukraine Travel Guide

While WordPower has the ability to record and playback you own pronunciations, I prefer the significantly less expensive SpeakEasy which includes a primer on the Cyrillic alphabet and a more straightforward typographic approach. The Ukraine Travel Guide seems to be pulled in large part from WikiPedia.

There are a bunch of free translation applications for the iPod but all of them require that you be connected for them to do their thing. For iPhone users they may make sense, but wifi is not ubiquitous in Lviv.