The Language Barrier

I don't want to be the stereotypical ugly American tourist.  I cringe whenever a team on The Amazing Race bitterly complains about a 3rd World taxi driver who can't speak English.  Therefore, I've always tried to learn a handful of basic words and phrases when I visit a country.  It's just the polite thing to do.  Sometimes, it's led to some funny stories.

When I was 24 and coming back from a vacation in Iceland, I ordered a specific Icelandic beer from the Icelandair flight attendant, said please, and thank you, and did it all in Icelandic.  She then started speaking to me in Icelandic, even though I look decidedly un-Icelandic.  It was one of the proudest moments of my life.

In Florence a few years later, I checked into a 2-star hotel and engaged in some very simple small talk with the desk clerk.  30 minutes later, the phone in my room rang.  It turns out the desk clerk really thought I could speak Italian and was calling to ask me to translate an incoming call from England for him.

Working for 6 months in France in 2008, I learned to read French fairly well, but conversations were always a problem.  The words just flow together so quickly in French, I had a very hard time keeping up.  And when I spoke French, at first, people would respond in English.  Later though, when people responded to me in French, I knew I was getting somewhere.  And then there was the time American tourists tried speaking to me in broken French.  I was really blending in at that point.

On this trip, we had 3 languages in 3 cities.  Of course, most people a tourist deals with speaks some English, but we wanted to make a good impression.  Fortunately, Kathleen speaks some German and did a great job with it.  But there was one museum cafe employee in Budapest we could not charm.  We were looking for the cloakroom and Kathleen asked her if she spoke English.  "Do you speak Hungarian?" was the rather coarse reply.  Well, wouldn't we have started in Hungarian if the answer was "yes?"  Anyway, we found the reaction more funny than off-putting, no matter how it was intended.