Can You Laugh When Things Go Wrong?

Have you ever tried to navigate your way through a new city where you didn’t speak the language? It’s a challenge, but it doesn’t have to be challenging. If you keep a good attitude and can laugh at yourself when you make mistakes (because trust me, you will make mistakes) you will get to your destination or achieve your goal with a smile on your face.

While in Russia, my friend and I came across many signs that we had no idea how to read. We were looking for a post office to mail some post cards and we thought we found one.

We walked into the office and saw that people were going over to a machine then selecting something, then waiting for their number to be called. Well, we tried to do what they did and walked over to the machine. This is what was staring back at us:

Could you have figured that out? We didn’t. We just laughed hysterically because we knew what we looked like to the people in the office, we had absolutely no idea what we were pushing but we chose one of those and waited.

When we got to the counter we showed the lady our postcard and pointed to the place where the stamp would be. She looked at us a bit funny them we broke out our dictionary and showed her the word ‘stamp’ in our dictionary.

She took the dictionary and found the word she needed to tell us in Russian.

Guess what it was?

Bank.

We were in a bank, not a post office. Again, we laughed and she laughed because it was funny. So, we thanked her in our broken Russian and walked out of the bank.

We eventually found a post office but that was on a different day and that is not a short story so I’ll save that adventure for another post. Just remember, don’t take yourself too seriously when you travel to another country, these experiences of laughter really help make the trip memorable and isn’t that what it’s all about?

Have you traveled to a country where you didn’t speak the language? How did you manage?