"One Bottle of Still Water, Please"

St. Petersburg, Russia doesn't often see temperatures of 30+ degrees Centigrade (over 85 F). But on that July morning the temperatures were approaching those numbers and going higher. I was dehydrated already, having flown for 24 hours from my home in Denver, Colorado and spent my first evening in country drinking beer on the coast of the Gulf of Finland while watching the midnight sunset. Russia Day 1 was going to be a long one, and I was going to need some help to get through it.

I could really use some water, I thought.

But therein lay the problem. The desired product stood in a refrigerator behind an old woman holding down the neighborhood kiosk counter. If I wanted a cold drink, I had to ask. Which meant I had to figure our how to ask for a bottle of water, and despite my two years of language study, I could not for the life of me put together the words and grammatical constructs I needed to get it. Behind the counter the babushka stoically stared down my stammered requests.

I was lucky that day. The Russian-speaking professor traveling with my study abroad group swooped in and ordered cold beverages for all of the students, and empowered us with the phrase that we would need to get more in the future (Odny butilky vodi, pozhalusta). We went on to tour St. Petersburg, study there for a month, and spend the four months after that learning and working in Moscow. I would go back to Moscow for an additional year, during which time I became as comfortable with the language as my own.

(I also became comfortable with having a gigantic monument of a cannon right outside my door).

But I still never forgot that feeling of panicked helplessness that July, of being so desperate for something so simple, and lacking the basic language skills I needed to get it. I vowed to never let it happen again to me. And when Kate and I started Blaze Travel Guides, I decided it should never happen to any of our readers either. Therefore, when we launch our product in June, in each city chapter you will be able to flip to the phrasebook and find out how to request one bottle of water in Russian, Czech, Croatian, and even Latvian.

Still water, actually. "One bottle of still water please." Because it's annoying when all you really want is a big cold drink of water, and you accidentally buy a bottle of the carbonated kind.