You should learn Spanish

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Walk and walk and walk

We walked and walked and walked today. We wanted to see as much as possible, not just in Valencia, but everywhere we visited in Spain.

Jardin Botanical Gardens

This afternoon we walked to the Jardin Botanical Garden. I would guess the garden is a mile or so from our hotel ... but we had walked a number of miles before heading off to the garden. When we stopped at the ticket office to pay, the man asked if we were pensioners. When we said yes, he said the garden was free for all pensioners. Wow! Spain really is wonderful to older folk.

It is an interesting garden and if you visit Valencia we recommend you visit this garden. There are a number of interesting plants. Also there are a lot of cats. We saw a sign asking people to consider adopting a park cat.

As we walked a man, about out age, approached and started talking to Bill.

I told him in Spanish that Bill didn't speak Spanish. Quite obviously he decided from what little I had said that I could speak Spanish and my 'dumb' husband couldn't. Well, he looked like this was the straw-that-broke-the-camel's-back for him. He had an "I am so disgusted with you." look on his face. From the next few minutes of time with him I suspect he has heard about the nasty attitude many USA folk have about Hispanics who don't learn English and decided this was his turn to settle something.

The fellow looked at Bill a few seconds and then launched into quite a speech. The gist of the speech was, if you are going to live here you need to learn to read and speak Spanish. Bill kept saying in English, "I only speak English." Of course the fellow had already figured that out and it definitely didn't help at all. I agree with him. If I were to move there I would try to learn the language. Apparently he did not think that we were tourists.

I wanted to stay longer looking at the plants in that section of the garden but once the man calmed down a little Bill headed out as fast as possible to another section! An odd encounter but one most English-only folk probably deserve.

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Comments

[Jeremy]

Out of proportion
"An odd encounter but one most English-only folk probably deserve." Not sure about that. You learn the language you need. Should I be irritated/angry that many people can't/won't "speak" or "read" multiple musical languages? Most of us have trouble making ourselves understood at all in our native tongue as it is. Sounds like this guy was itching to get some anger out. You were tourists! Geez. Probably was a backlash against globalization and language push (so to speak).