Naive traveller
I am sure there are people that will laugh at me here.... and with good cause, but in Spain... they mostly only speak Spanish.
One of the most common misconceptions I have heard is that English is spoken everywhere and it's so easy to travel. Well it's not always the case. I travelled to Spain recently and as I have grown up in Australia, I have never truly had the need to learn another language. Australia is just a large island of English speakers floating around in the Southern part of the globe... for anyone who may have missed it.
I am quite in awe of other countries whose inhabitants are often bilingual. I am tri-lingual... in as much as I try to speak what I see written and it is not even close to what it is meant to sound like. Fortunately I had a friend join the same tour as me and he could speak Spanish, French and he simply adapted for Portuguese. It even came in handy in a store in Madrid with Asians... we weren't quite sure where they were from... until all of a sudden he is speaking fluently to them. Apparently Mandarin. Up until he discovered what language he needed, I had been trying to procure a new IPhone cord because I had left mine in Salamanca and they had been pointing to light globes.
So, I am now wondering where I need to explore in the future and what I need to learn before getting there. Italian seems a likely choice. I am told if I can learn one of the languages, the others will come naturally to me.
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I think that holds true even now. They are usually multilingual... it's fascinating to watch as they swap languages. When I was in Morocco recently... the tour guide knew six languages- French, Arabic, German, English, Spanish and Portuguese. He quite literally went from talking to the driver of the coach in Portuguese to speaking in Spanish with the other guide and then he would step off the coach at our stops and speak French.
Even in the US ... you will usually speak a little bit of Spanish because of your proximity to Mexico.
I was just telling K that Scotland's Summer was 16C , which was what I was experiencing at home in the Winter.