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.
romaincrisis
theartofmadeline
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