Czechia 2026 - Day 06 - Saturday 30th May 2026 - Polyglot Gathering 2026 - Day 06/09 - Brno - Hungover Breakfast
- eusts6
- Jun 11
- 3 min read
Being hungover, I was late for breakfast but it turned out to be a very good idea as we pushed together two tables and more and more of "us" just joined in and we talked about the good the bad and the strange during the gathering.
I made my way to the university, which was about a km away and joined the German table again. I was speaking to a Polish man with C level and a Polish woman with B level german I was struggling with my Rotterdam level A German so l left early and left to chat with the rest of the group, I had to shelter inside as the weather turned bad. I chatted to Brandy Ruvalcaba from Mexico, and exchanged my recordings of her where she was dancing in the garden our dancing queen!
I had spoken to Giulia the previous day, in the X building about Italian food, it turns out she speaks Dublin English and I loved the whole Italian-Irish connection to I was committed to go to here talk in the Q building "Parla Come Mangi" which I thoroughly enjoyed, reflecting on what we spoke about the day before the myth that such a thing as "Italian Food" even exists!
While chilling outside sitting in a deck chair, Steffen a German guy came up and we spoke in Dutch for a while, he didn't sit as it had been raining. So he continued for a while doing the "Slavic Squat" before we moved to a bench, where we were joined by some others and we quickly collected a multi national multi lingual crowd. We all decided to go to the presentation about reading foreign books, but presented in French. The claim was that you need 80% comprehension before you can try to read, but that seems too low for me.
My next stop was a wonderful and fascinating talk on then Chuvash language, which is spoke in Central Russia by some 700, 000 people. It is a Turkic language a distant cousin or Turkish and sounds vaguely Turkish to my ears.
After the lecture the sun came out again and we (James and I) went to dinner, the food was a bit better with a chickpea curry, some cabbage burgers and of course the beer too. I had suggested the wine tasting earlier to Steffen and James was pretty keen so we used Google Maps, which firstly misled us but we found a second place open, called "Kaple". This was bar in a cellar which was kind of gothic.
We spoke about European history for hours just as Steffen joined us several wines later with another friend of his. We switch from history talked for ages about swearing in different languages and some of the more colourful characters. We all clicked very well, and in the end me and James stayed on even though he had a flight the next day. Towards midnight, closing time I ended up buying a case of wine, the one km walk was very long but ti my pleasant surprise I was met by a bunch of friendly polyglots outside my hotel all of use wearing our language badges, we chatted for a bit before going to bed.
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