There are endless reasons I love to travel, but one of those reasons is that I love being exposed to other languages and cultures that I’m not accustomed to being around every day here in the U.S. I actually love listening to people speak other languages, especially the ones I cannot readily recognize. So when I hear people, all American, tell me that they get tired and frustrated being in a “foreign” country for as short of a period as just two days and not hearing English, I always feel part annoyed, part embarrassed. I feel annoyed because — why are you traveling to non-English speaking countries if you cannot handle hearing other languages constantly? And I feel embarrassed because these people are representative of my country: they feel entitled, as though the rest of the world needs to learn and speak and know English just because we do and we are clearly the center of the entire universe, and they think that our way here is the best way. And sadly, what this ultimately reveals is our own inner prejudices and biases against cultures other than what we are used to.

I don’t know where we learn this from – it must be the inane American exceptionalism that is taught in a lot of classrooms across this country. It is absolutely atrocious. But hey, we live in Trump Nation now, so I guess this will be part of our everyday rhetoric that I better start getting used to.