Over winter break of my junior year, I went to Spain, Italy, and Greece. Although this was not a study abroad or service trip, I was able to get a taste of different cultures and practice my use my second language in Spain. I traveled with my roommate, whose sister lived in Madrid at the time, so it was nice to explore Spain in a less touristy way. There were numerous cultural norms in the countries I visited that I hadn’t known about before visiting them. Some examples of these cultural norms are that water isn’t free at restaurants, people live a much slower pace of life than people from the United States, and there is an openness to sexuality that we don’t experience in America. In Spain people wake up and go to bed later than in in the United States and they walk on the left side of the escalator and stand on the right. While some of these cultural practices are more significant than others, they were all things that stood out to me throughout my trip to Europe.

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My experiences in Spain, Italy, and Greece achieves Knowledge and Understanding 1 and Communication 3 and 4.

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Before leaving for my trip overseas, I brushed up on my Spanish for my time in Spain and figured all the countries would speak some English. I took up to College Spanish II, so speaking to waiters or merchants wasn’t super uncomfortable for me. However, I was uncomfortable speaking in settings I had never practiced in the classroom. For example, my roommate and I got confused on the metro and wanted to ask someone which way to walk. It was hard to convert what I wanted to say in English and convey it in Spanish. This was especially the case because we were in a rush. This experience helps me understand what it might be like for a student in the United States if English is not their first language. It was a weird feeling knowing what I wanted to say but being unable to say it in the correct language. Luckily, my roommate is fluent in Spanish, so we never ran into any actual problems.

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I found that the people in Spain appreciated me speaking their language even if it wasn’t perfect, which is something that I was self-conscious about. I realized that this is how some of my colleagues must feel speaking English in America. One of my professors from Turkey told me how careful she is to spell everything correctly and that she is sometimes worried about speaking English words wrong. At the time, I didn’t quite understand this because I didn’t think a single student would mind if there was a misspelled word in her PowerPoint slides or if she messed up a few words. Because I have always lived in communities where everyone speaks English, I had never had to speak a nonnative language to a native speaker. In a broader perspective, in the United States, we assume that everyone can speak English and thus they often don’t learn other languages and are unable to empathize with people whose first language is one other than English. In this way, language often shapes cultures by bringing people who speak the same language together and sometimes pulling people away from those who don’t speak the same language.

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In the future, I will undoubtedly work with or have interactions with people who don’t speak English as their first language. I will be cognizant that it may be nerve racking or uncomfortable for them to speak English in front of large groups. I also will not encourage anyone else to make fun of the way someone speaks English by saying something when this happens in social settings.