Bücher! Livre! Boeken! βιβλία! 本!

europa books
Originally uploaded by missmaria.

When the price isn't right for adding stamps to the ol' passport, I get my Euro-fix with a $1.75 bus ride to Europa Books, a foreign language bookstore on State Street. Something about being surrounded by words I don't understand makes me happy. There's even a charmingly snooty French dude at the register.

The first floor is stocked with foreign lang mags — familiar titles, mostly in French, Spanish, and German. There are also books for les petits enfants, including no less than a dozen different translations of Mssr. Harry Potter's exploits. These are great when you're learning a language or actually want to enjoy brushing up on one.



The lower level features literature, travel guides, and a bevy of dictionaries, phrase books, and learn-a-language-in-your car discs for everything from Albanian to Thai to Palestinian Arabic. Western Euro lit dominates the fiction shelves, but nestled in the language study section are some non-traditional tomes that are fun in their own right. With my newfound free time, I'm getting back to studying Japanese, so I picked up a refresher: the first volume of Japanese in Mangaland, an "entertaining way of learning the basics."



Also grabbed the latest Paris Match. It's a win-win read: keeping up with the latest Euro gossip while working on my French!