Cocktails and Records

A funny thing happened to me on the way home this evening… something that I’ve only ever seen happen ‘abroad’.

You see, a woman rushed up to me at my local suburban train station tonight as I was approaching the escalators. She explained in a peculiar mixture of frantic embarrassment that she had too much luggage to take by herself, that she was kind of scared she might fall down the escalator and could I help her until her husband arrived. So I took a suitcase and a bag, and once at the foot of the escalator, I assisted her in stacking a somewhat formidable pile of luggage while we waited for her husband to come down with their baby. I then pointed them in the direction of central London, they thanked me and we went off our separate ways.

The odd thing was that this all happened in French.

As much as I’ve cringed at some of my fellow English speaking natives shameless usage  of the  ‘loud and slow’ dialect in other countries, I don’t think anyone has ever just randomly started speaking to me in another language whilst in the UK or Australia.

I’m not sure how I feel about this. I don’t know whether I’m more surprised that I could communicate with her (especially considering my poor relationship with my French classes over the past year) or the fact that she just assumed that everyone at the station spoke French and wasn’t in the faintest bit taken aback that I did. Perhaps some people think higher of the foreign language speaking skills of this country than we do. Either that, or fear of the escalator conquers all.

Tags: cultural difference, language matters

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 3rd, 2010 at 9:17 pm and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.