to learn the language of the countries they visit?
I've been to Italy almost a dozen times but haven't learned anything
beyond a few phrases.
I'm OK at those languages I learned at school/college (e.g. French,
German, Italian) and speak Spanish with my partner, but I admit to going
to many countries where I haven't bothered to learn the most basic
phrases. I haven't encountered terrible problems so far, I have to say.

The one place where I've had real problems was in Slovakia. The issue
was that Marion has serious food intolerances to wheat and dairy, so
we needed to know what was in what we were eating. But Slovak food
labelling is dreadful both in shops and restaurants, and packaged foods
were generally only labelled in Slavic languages (no English, German,
French, Italian or Turkish, any of which I can read labels in). Also,
Slovak food tends to be unidentifiable brown goo (compared with Turkish
or Bosnian food, where you can just look at it and see immediately what
it's made of). Further, Slovak has as many different words coding the
presence of wheat or dairy products as English does ("malt", "whey",
"sodium caseinate", "bran", "cheese powder", "butterfat"...) and food
handling staff are even more clueless about the basic composition of
what they're serving than their British counterparts are. We ended up
with a bizarre diet restricted to what we could positively identify.

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Jack Campin, 11 Third Street, Newtongrange, Midlothian EH22 4PU, Scotland
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