While I was filling my car, some guy walked up and began speaking to me in Spanish. He was rapidly rattling off the story of how he had been visiting family up in Albuquerque and needed to get back to Juarez, but he only has pesos and the gas station (oddly) only took dollars. Despite my half of the conversation being rather terse, he never seemed to have caught on that I’m not really a Spanish speaker. So I traded him some greenbacks for Mexican pesos. According to the current exchange rate, I came out ahead by about $3. Of course, for all I know the portrait on the front could be one of the Mexican Three Stooges.

If only there were some way I could spend pesos around here…

It’s always been a little strange for me that in this part of the country people occasionally begin conversations with me in Spanish. But when I think about, I have been more or less similar in the past. I had been in Beijing for about a month and was at a bar. Most of the non-Chinese visitors to that city were from elsewhere in Asia, Oceania, or Europe. I saw a black man and went over to talk to him, as my colleagues were the only Americans I had seen in a while. When I started talking to him in English, he answered back in Portuguese. I assumed as most Americans probably do, that all black people are from the U.S. Interestingly, I found that I could converse on some level with a Portuguese speaker with only my poor Spanish language skills. I hope to see how well that works with Italian if I ever get to that part of the world.