hooleydooleyfuckaroonie:invisiblefoxfire:iguessweallcrazyithinktho:Its The colonization The first ti
hooleydooleyfuckaroonie:invisiblefoxfire:iguessweallcrazyithinktho:Its The colonization The first time I left the US was on a trip with my grandmother to Germany. My grandmother was always traveling. Always! Always off on some holiday somewhere, always bringing back tacky souvenirs. I spoke a bit of German but was far from fluent. I’d been a little worried about communication but my grandmother assured me we’d be fine. She did this all the time, after all.My grandmother left me in the hotel room one morning to sleep in while she went to the nearby bakery to get some pastries for breakfast. When she returned, she looked very flustered. She got me up because she had to get this off her chest. The woman in the bakery… didn’t speak ANY English. In her words, “Not a lick of English! Not one word!” I replied, heavy with sarcasm, “Really? In GERMANY?” She didn’t pick up on my sarcasm at all and just thought I was equally as astonished as her.Turns out every trip she’d ever taken was with some pre-planned tour group for obnoxious white Americans. Never in all her years of traveling had she just gone into a small local shop and had to interact with a local whose entire business didn’t revolve around serving people like her. It was a genuine surprise to her that a person - especially a white person! - would actually not understand English.I later went down to the bakery to apologize as well as I could in German. Fortunately the woman found it very amusing that the American woman just kept talking louder and slower instead of trying to communicate in some other way, and wasn’t bothered at all. But from that day forward I understood something about my grandmother (and a whole hell of a lot of other Americans) that I could never unlearn. That she literally saw everywhere in the world that wasn’t America like some kind of giant fucking Disney World and everyone who didn’t speak English as some kind of bumbling savage. I was embarrassed to be seen with her, ashamed to be there with her. This is very much A Thing and it’s fucking awful. When I was young and traveling in the late 90s and to about 2007 I want to say? Every time we left the United states we were sat down and would go through some vocabulary that kids should know. Mainly thank yous, hellos and arbitrary pleasantries.I learned why this was so important the first time we went to France, we entered a port town after leaving England via boat. My Mother barely speaking French, it was nearing 9pm and we had missed the train because of a docking issue to get to our booked hotel.The ticket master of the ferry pointed us towards an old inn run by the sweetest woman I had ever met. She met us outside of it, waving us over and through my Mom’s poor French and the Innkeepers broken english the two worked so much out. And after signing us in before she went to prep the room herself. She brought each of my siblings a tea pot filled with some of the best hot chocolate I ever had. Because it was so chilly. The next morning she did the same.Every time I said Merci in french she’d just light up, she even help me learn a few extra things in the short time of breakfast. Apple, orange, tea cup.It’s one of my favourite memories as a kid and something I try to show to people who can’t speak English visiting America as I work retail. Because, expecting fluent English is rude.Appreciate people that can speak your language, no matter how small, because they’re doing their best. -- source link
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