Prague or Cape Town?

Millancad
Tue, 18 Jun 2013 08:18:24 +0000

I’m a little biased because I’ve been to Europe a ton of times (I’m posting this from France), but I would undoubtedly do South Africa. Europe is generally a lot easier to get to than Africa from America. It’s physically closer and more people travel back and forth between the two continents, so there are more cheap and readily available flights. You will probably have many more chances to travel through Europe than you will to travel through Africa.

As for what you can do while you’re there, being with a large group of other Americans is something that would be more important to me in South Africa than Europe. Most places I have been to or want to go to in Europe are fairly safe, have fairly stable governments, and have rather good relationships with the US. This is less true of a lot of places I would want to visit in Africa. I spend tons of time in Europe on my own and usually feel totally safe - though as a petite girl who is from time to time mistaken for a tween, I avoid going out alone after dark. I’m about to make my first solo trip to (northern) Africa, and I’m apprehensive.

I also don’t think taking Czech is worth having to overload later. I’m saying this as a person who has spent the last 2 years studying a language that usually gets the question “What’s that?” when brought up, and who’s devoted the last year to researching a language with fewer than 500 speakers, so I have no personal bias against languages that aren’t particularly useful or widely spoken.