Living in another country when you don’t speak the language forces you into a submissive helplessness. Your capacity to communicate is weakened, and so you are forced to rely much more on others for help. Everything becomes an active process, and small acts such as buying vegetables can trigger a fight-or-flight response as you scramble to interpret meaning while also not wanting to look like an idiot. It is deeply uncomfortable. It also gets much easier after the first time, the first country or language.

One of our main reasons for this trip to Transylvania that my girlfriend and I were on was the wedding of a friend of hers. Out of everything we had planned in advance, it was the thing I was the most nervous for: hundreds of people from a small group of villages in the country, who would each know many people there, who would all speak the same language—unlike me. Not to mention that I had been pre-warned that these weddings easily last until 7 or 8 in the morning, and that a frightening amount of drinking would not only be involved, but heavily encouraged. 

Fortunately, my mother tongue is a virus that has spread across the world as we have become more globalised, and so it wasn’t like I’d be completely helpless. Even here, words like cringe and vibe find their way into regular Hungarian speech. But this doesn’t save me from the majority of random, spontaneous human interactions, which I often can only meet with an awkward laugh or a smile, eyes to the floor. This is where the aforementioned drinking proves quite useful.

There’s this sound in Hungarian that I find impossible to pronounce, coming from the letter gy. It’s something like the du in the word duty, only the tongue needs to be placed further back in the mouth. Linguists apparently would call it a voiced palatal plosive, whereas I’d elect to call it an absolute nightmare that makes me feel like I’m trying to use my tongue to roll three marbles around one another at the same time. Consciously, I shit my pants a little every time I need to say it, which isn’t so easy since it shows up an awful lot—like in the tremendously easy to say word egészégedre to toast a drink. 

The pants-shitting is lessened under the influence of alcohol, as anyone who’s learnt a language before will tell you. So too is it lessened by me taking the limiters off my sociability, forcing myself to be more talkative, make more jokes at my expense, and in general leaning way harder into Australian stereotypes (yes, our spiders really are that big, but they’re not the ones you need to be afraid of mate, because…). It’s not unlike overclocking the CPU on a computer, removing the safety limits to increase performance with the risk of overheating and damaging it.

All of this is to say that it was actually an incredible night, and that everyone was exceptionally kind and interested as to what an Australian was doing at a wedding in the heart of Transylvania. Leveraging my uncapped social abilities, and sticking firmly to my drinking game plan to maintain a healthy buzz all night (three drinks in the first hour, then two per hour), I felt like a god. This lasted a wonderful few hours, wherein we chatted, danced the csardás, and I was taught many phrases in the local dialect. Eventually, however, the local group of “the boys” (as I will call them) found out that there was an Australian at the party, and said Australian, whose drinking scheme had rendered him highly susceptible to reverting to his early twenties of partying with “the boys”, and things went a little haywire, involving stealing the bride, crashing two other weddings, and notably a whole lot of lightly-coerced drinking. I was Icarus, and it felt glorious.

I don’t drink so much these days, but admittedly it can lead to some of the best kinds of adventures. When I awoke the next day with a hangover that made my skull feel like a dark, musty dungeon, my girlfriend told me that it seemed like I ended up having more fun than she did. Of course, I had to face the consequences the next day, the guilt of ditching her on the dance floor for a few hours, when we’d gone to the event as a couple, and the light feeling of shame, amplified by the hangover, as her friends texted her asking if I was okay, and how hungover I was. 

And since soon enough, the holiday will be over, and the work starts again, I tried to be kind to myself. It worked out okay.