To Speak or Not To Speak

   I don't know how many of you have ever gone out of the U.S. and visited a country where English is not spoken natively, and of course vice versa, but I've noticed a sort of pattern that appears between English speakers and non-English speakers.

   Laissez-moi expliquer: it seems, at least to me, that whenever someone from another country vistas America, we elect them to speak English, and they expect to speak it as well. And yet, when we English speaking Americans visit another non-English speaking country, we speak English to the people there and expect them to understand at least a little bit.

    I have two examples to support these claims; the first is that over the summer, when I was working at the Botanic Gardens, we had a lot of tourists from all over the world. There were tourists from Southeast Asia and India and Japan and Eastern Europe and Western Europe and no matter where they were from, we always spoke English to them and they spoke not back. But, when my mom travel dot Italy on business last year, she came back and complained to me about how hard to was to get around because "nobody spoke any English."

   I wonder then if these sorts of assumptions are the reasons why America has the reputation that it does. I’m not saying everybody is like this, but the overwhelming majority of Americans seem to think that English is so important that it's nearly impossible for there ego be a place where no one speaks even a little of it. And again, what does that say about us as people?