Things I won’t miss #2 – while shopping at Carrefour Vake yesterday (where there were no carts available whatsoever), three employees answered my inquiries, spoken in perfectly understandable albeit accented Georgian, in equally heavily accented English. I usually let this go and just respond in English, because otherwise I would be arguing with every other person I speak to. But since I’m leaving, what the hell. I said to them, in Georgian – “I’m speaking Georgian, right? So why are you speaking English?” I said it with a smile, and to my surprise, each kind of laughed ashamedly and nodded, and switched to Georgian. Maybe I should have been doing this all along. My Georgian language skills would have gotten a lot more practice, and no doubt would be much stronger.

An observation – in Spain, this never happened. My son speaks passable Spanish, probably about as good as my Georgian (in other words, not very – he tells everyone to speak to him as if he were a child), but not one waiter, taxi driver or anyone else spoke to him in English once he started the conversation in Spanish. Ever. They respected his attempt to speak their language and easily tolerated his mistakes, even when they required a bit more work in communicating, and even though some of them in fact did speak English and could have switched. He appreciated this, and so did I.