It's a very strange phenomenon. You can spend all day roaming Fort Collins and never stop to talk with anyone. Yet if you roam a city in a foreign country where you don't speak the native tongue, and few of the natives speak yours, you'll find you make friends in a hurry. While stopping for lunch in a restaurant, we had trouble telling the waiter to return after we had a chance to struggle through the menu. Four girls at the next table interceded on our behalf and bought us some time. The next morning as we tried to decide which bus to board for our tour of
Turgen Gorge, we heard a young voice say hello. Sure enough, the 4 girls were planning to take the same tour! (3
buses later we finally found ourselves in the right bus - but that's another story.) We had a great visit. Two of the girls are Civil Engineering students at
USC. We took pictures and encouraged them to email us - and offered them a place to stay if they could make it to Colorado. After only a few weeks we have "close" friends from Canada, Bulgaria, Virginia, South Carolina, and Kazakhstan. The oddity of finding someone speaking English seems to be enough to warrant a conversation. And everyone who speaks English is interesting! Is it because we are starved for companionship? Is it because those travel to faraway places are interesting? Is it because those who learn English as a 2
nd (or 3rd or 5
th) language are naturally brighter and more open? Or do we just need to start talking to more people at home too?
It's a very strange phenomenon. You can spend all day roaming Fort Collins and never stop to talk with anyone. Yet if you roam a city in a foreign country where you don't speak the native tongue, and few of the natives speak yours, you'll find you make friends in a hurry. While stopping for lunch in a restaurant, we had trouble telling the waiter to return after we had a chance to struggle through the menu. Four girls at the next table interceded on our behalf and bought us some time. The next morning as we tried to decide which bus to board for our tour of Turgen Gorge, we heard a young voice say hello. Sure enough, the 4 girls were planning to take the same tour! (3 buses later we finally found ourselves in the right bus - but that's another story.) We had a great visit. Two of the girls are Civil Engineering students at USC. We took pictures and encouraged them to email us - and offered them a place to stay if they could make it to Colorado. After only a few weeks we have "close" friends from Canada, Bulgaria, Virginia, South Carolina, and Kazakhstan. The oddity of finding someone speaking English seems to be enough to warrant a conversation. And everyone who speaks English is interesting! Is it because we are starved for companionship? Is it because those travel to faraway places are interesting? Is it because those who learn English as a 2nd (or 3rd or 5th) language are naturally brighter and more open? Or do we just need to start talking to more people at home too?
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