One important aspect of my recent travels has been to put myself into the shoes of people who move to Australia who do not speak English. Bill Bryson’s quote below sums up some of my own feelings of bewilderment and joy.
“When I told friends in London that I was going to travel around Europe and write a book about it, they said. “Oh, you must speak a lot of languages.”
“Why no,” I would reply with a certain pride, “only English,” and they would look at me as if I was foolish or crazy. But that’s the glory of foreign travel, as far as I am concerned. I don’t want to know what people are talking about. I can’t think of anything that excites a greater sense of childlike wonder than to be in a country where you are ignorant of almost everything. Suddenly you are five years old again. You can’t read anything, you have only the most rudimentary sense of how things work, you can’t even reliably cross a street without endangering your life. Your whole existence becomes a series of interesting guesses.” (Bryson, 1992, p. 36)
Bryson, B. (1992). Neither here nor there: Travels in Europe. New York: HarperCollins.
