Enigmatic Mermaid brings up Italo Calvino's Italian Fables and that reminds me of a story.
I once spent a month in Italy learning a bit of Italian at the Università Italiana per Stranieri. I'd heard of Calvino's book in its Gringolandian translation, so I bought a copy of Fiabe Italiane upon arrival and tried over the course of the month to read it. At my level, even simple folktales were a challenge. On day trips around central Italy by train, a classmate and I would whip out the Calvino and a pocket dictionary and stumble through it aloud, translating as we went; that inevitably broke the ice with our fellow passengers and before long the entire compartment would be deep into explicating "L'uomo che usciva solo di notte" or "Il naso d'argento". I highly recommend the method, both for language learning and for travel. It would probably work for picking up friendly locals, too, if you have some additional skills I didn't have.
I'm not sure what the equivalent in the US would be. Reading a Star Wars novelization on a Greyhound, maybe?