Not a Piece of Cake

The other day, I had to call Spain. I speak reasonable Spanish, but even so, I could not get the person on the other end to understand what I was saying. It probably didn’t help that I had the wrong number. But with my background, I felt I should have been able to do better.
But there are reasons why this didn’t work. For starters, Spanish people use a lot of gesture and eye contact when they speak. You don’t get that on the phone. Also, they’re not used to foreigners speaking their language. They use English as a lingua franca, particularly within the tourist industry. So, they are not used to making the concessions that the non-native speaker needs if they are to communicate well.
Yes, English is spoken all over the world. But it is often limited to specific circumstances. I have a shrewd suspicion that no matter how competent the waiter, taxi-driver, tour guide, bank clerk or estate agent in Spain seem, they will rarely go above that magical level B1 of the European Languages Passport outside their area.
Interesting how we are bound by language. It is one of the things, they tell us, that separate us from the animals. Yet it remains one of our biggest barriers to communication between people on this planet. Perhaps there is something in Babel.