If it hasn't happened to you already, trust me, it will: Your first time overseas, on at least one occasion, you will inadvertently find yourself speaking slowly and loudly in English, but with a horrifying caricature of the local accent. For me, it was in Italy when this first happened, when I suddenly realized that I was pontificating to the waitress like I was Mario doing an impression of Luigi doing an impression of Tony Danza, and believe me when I say, nothing can make you blend in less, or look more shamefully American, than speaking English with a loud Italian accent. In Italy.

I found myself also doing a version of this in Mexico and, to lesser degree, Spain. I would find myself speaking 100% English words but (to help them understand me, I guess?) in a bizarre Spanish/Mexican accent. At least with Spanish, I can sprinkle in the occasional Spanish word that I know, like lechuga. When every word I say except the word "lettuce" is in English, I find it brings a real sense of authenticity and relatability to my speech.

It's a loathed stereotype, and no one wants to be the obnoxious, entitled, American tourist, but trust me, it will happen. It's like our brains are wired to do this. It's a stereotype for a reason! Other countries are stressful. Nothing is the way it "should" be, the way you are used to in America, plus no one can understand you or speak English, and so despite yourself, you might find yourself throwing a tiny tantrum, maybe even crying a little bit in public. I have done both.

When you realize you are doing this, best case scenario, you will be embarrassed and ashamed, and likely swear to yourself to make a conscientious effort to never do it again. Worst case scenario, if they don't ask you to leave, I imagine they will probably spit in your food. The good news is, the more you travel, the less likely you are to behave like this. It comes with practice.

I am not only a very loud person, but I also have the overt and exaggerated facial expressions of a painted clown; so I have to be hyperaware of my behavior and mannerisms at all times, if I want to avoid offending every single person I meet. It is something I constantly work on when traveling, and I take great pride in being much less awful than I was previously.

In recent years, I have even started incorporating a lot of universal signals into my interactions -- such as Big Toothy Smiling with my mouth, and constant Thumbs Up signs with my hands -- to help communicate to everyone I meet what a friendly, easygoing person I am. What could communicate "Yes," "Happiness," and "You're Doing a Good Job," all at the same time, better than a Thumbs Up sign? Its meaning is pretty universal, so I use it literally hundreds of times a day when traveling in other countries.

At least, I thought it was universal... which is I was absolutely horrified when I finally watched the first Episode of Apple TV's series, Tehran. I had been in Egypt and Jordan just months prior, tossing around Thumbs Up signs like they were candy. I think I must have given a Thumbs Up to almost every person I met. And I was gearing up to go to Morocco in just a few short months, where I undoubtedly planned to do the same thing. "Don't spit in his food," I wanted everyone to say, "he's clearly very friendly and likeable! He gave us two thumbs up!" Or something like that.

Well, the reason I am now horrified (and trying to replay every single interaction back in my head, where I might have given a Thumbs Up sign to an Arabic person), is because very early on in Tehran, Season 1, the main character gets in shit-tons of trouble. She is almost discovered as the spy she is, all because she unwittingly tossed the Thumbs Up sign to an Arabic man. If she really was the ethnicity she claimed to be (the show would have us believe), then she would have known that in the Middle East, the Thumbs Up gesture rudely means "F*ck off, and shove it up your ass." Or something like that.

Whaaaaaaaaaaaat?!?! Nooooooooo! Was I really going around all of the Middle East telling people to F*ck Off?! Surely they know it means something different in my country? They must. Don't they have Facebook? Or surely the accompaniment of my big toothy smile helped to clarify my amicable intentions? Or was it quite possible that I just consumed more spit in my food than any human known to man. Geez.

Was I really gesturing the equivalent of a middle finger to almost every person I met? And now that I think back, I was often double-fisting those Thumbs Up signs, too, much like the motion you'd make to indicate two imaginary suspenders. "Shove it up your ass, Guys! Really far, maybe twice!" Smile smile smile.

I was hoping to Allah that the writers of Tehran took some artistic liberties, or perhaps made this up entirely.... but why would they do that? It didn't seem like that kind of show. Just to be safe, I decided right then and there that in Morocco, there would be absolutely no more Thumbs Up signs from me, to anyone, for any reason.

Also, after that, I was afraid to watch any more episodes of Tehran, for fear of learning something else equally disturbing and humiliating. In the Middle East, is smiling maybe how they communicate, "I want to bite your mother's tits?" Or something similarly upsetting? It's possible! Thanks, Tehran now I'm questioning everything I ever thought I knew. My reality is a lie!

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One of my favorite conversational games to play with a new group of friends is the classic question, "If you could be granted only one SUPERPOWER, what would it be?" Followed by, "Now what if you could have two?"

(Being allowed two enables people to get a sanctimonious, altruistic, choice out of their system and get more creative and selfish with the second).

You can learn a lot about people this way, in a very short amount of time. For example, if the person I'm dating says they'd like to be invisible, as the answer to either question, I will have learned that we probably need to part ways, as invisibility is quite easily the creepiest of all superpowers. I feel like it's the choice of a psychopath.

Conversely, my choice to be able to fly probably seems both unoriginal and lazy, although I've actually put a lot of thought into it. It turns out, occasionally a popular choice achieves that status simply because it's the very best. Flying might be a boring first choice, but it allows me to accomplish so many amazing things, all with that one power, that I can be pretty frivolous with the second: I would like to be able to speak and understand all languages all over the world, both past, present, and future. (And yes, that includes cultural and colloquial gestures, as well as sign language).

I talk a great deal about traveling and language barriers HERE, and what it's like to frequently find myself in situations where I have little to no clue what is going on around me, all because I don't speak the local language. It is often extremely frustrating, having a head full of questions and no one around who can give you answers, but it has also given me an immense appreciation for all the people who live here in America, that speak little to no English.

On a daily or even hourly basis, the world must be a very nonsensical, confusing, and frustrating place for them. When I am in a foreign country, I know how difficult it sometimes is just to accomplish a seemingly trivial task, like going to a bank, when no one around you speaks your language. It makes me want to scream! I can't communicate complex thoughts to anyone around me, and they can’t communicate theirs to me. Lofty concepts and hypotheticals are off the table. We are reduced to speaking in the here and now, to pantomime, to constant misunderstandings. What must it be like for people who experience this here in America, day in, day out, with no end in sight? It must be like a living nightmare, one I can only partially imagine.

I also think about how lucky I am that English is the language I was taught to speak. Not because of any fervent patriotism or American nationalism, but because I have come to realize that speaking English goes squarely in my list of Personal Privileges. More of the world is open to me because of the mere, simple, fact that I speak English. Almost anywhere in the world that I go, chances are that I will find ATMs, signs, menus, books, and people that speak my language.

I have met many individuals around the world who speak an exotic, esoteric language specific to only a small area or tribe. A few Berber and Bedouin dialects come to mind, from my recent journeys to MOROCCO and EGYPT. At first that might seem unbelievably cool -- I know it did to me -- until you stop and really think about it. This person's world is very small. Even domestic travel will prove very difficult for him. There are very few books or movies or television programs distributed in his language, and I bet the ones that do exist are exceedingly difficult to procure. The world is not as open to him as it is to me. He was raised with something of a handicap, being taught to only speak a language that is not very helpful on a global scale.

Likewise, I feel constantly handicapped by my inability to speak another language here at home in Texas, specifically Spanish. I wish I could go back in time and yell at my younger self, or at least somehow emphasize to him how important and helpful learning to speak Spanish would eventually become. In grade school, although BIBLE CLASS came for free and took up an overwhelming portion of each day, Spanish class was not part of our official curriculum, and our parents had to pay extra for it. The class happened over on a remote, weird, part of the campus, in a subfloor classroom, and therefore I don't think I took it very seriously. I grouped it in the same category as learning to play the recorder or learning to juggle silk scarves: just a passing amusement.

The Spanish teacher had purchased a bunch of fake, plastic fruits and vegetables (probably with her own money) and would set up a little pretend grocery store scenario for us. Over the course of many years, I managed to learn the Spanish name of various food items, and that is where my ability level remains to this day: if we went to a grocery store together, I could run around the store with you and yell out the Spanish name of various items as you pointed to them.

Yep, I treated Spanish as a passing amusement, little more than a parlor trick, and so it should come as no surprise that that's the ability level I attained. Then later, in college, rather than learn a second language, I idiotically doubled down in one that I already spoke, and for a while pursued a major in English. With as much as I travel, people regularly ask me what all languages I speak, and I tell them the same thing I am telling you, that sadly, unless I am magically granted my (second) superpower, I am pretty much useless, linguistically, in any non-English speaking country. Sometimes my knowledge of English root words and origins will allow me to extrapolate the meaning of various European words and signs, but by the time I've done all that, chances are we've missed our train, or I've been able to figure out from context clues that I'm in the lady's restroom.

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Navigating through a foreign country can become frustrating, for sure, but much less so now that we all have the internet in the palm of our hands. In recent years, I have come to think about getting around, or even getting lost, as just a big, fun, puzzle that needs to be solved. It might take more time than you ever imagined or allotted for, but in the end, it always works itself out and you get where you need to go.

My primary frustration about traveling in non-English speaking countries is a bit more atypical, and it didn't really start becoming a problem until I began venturing into more remote, obscure places. The Andes, the Sahara, the Himalayas.... all of these journeys have a similar thread in common, and I am speaking here again about being somewhere, and standing right in front of something, but having no idea what it is you are looking at.

For example, one of the main regrets I have about the EBC TREK in Nepal, was that our guide did not speak enough English to adequately describe to us the significance of many things we encountered, several of the landmarks we asked about, or almost any other spontaneous question that arose. If its purview extended beyond the realm of what he had memorized in English to say about a thing, our questions would go unanswered. And we almost never had internet service on our phones (or anywhere else, really) to ascertain the information for ourselves.

Our guide would frequently know the English translation of a word, which is a start, but then that's all he would know. He would have THE VOCABULARY, but no way to put it into context or convey any comprehensible meaning. It was as helpful as me in the grocery store, being able to point at a head of lettuce and yell, "lechuga!"

Yes Ryan, what about this lechuga, this lettuce? On a good day, I could probably also recall the word "verde," so now I have been able to tell you not one but two different things that you can already see for yourself: that this is lettuce and that it is green. Maybe next I can juggle some silk scarves for everyone?

The interesting thing about at least knowing some vocabulary, however, is that if you can recall those words in a thing's absence, now we are getting somewhere, we are achieving association. For example, I also know the Spanish word for salad, "ensalata," so with some effort I could probably (eventually) communicate to you that we often use this green lettuce to make a salad. It's not much, but if you'd never seen or encountered lettuce previously, it is more than you knew before.

And so this is basically how we traveled through the Everest Region of Nepal, with our guide being able to offer up random vocab words at random intervals, words that sometimes, but not always, contributed to a better understanding of what we were seeing. More often than not, however, we were left with an even hazier conceptualization of a thing than what we initially possessed, but with the added bonus of now being unbelievably frustrated with one another, and barely on speaking terms for the rest of the day.

I think there is a very good reason that we call them language barriers rather than something more innocuous, like language speed bumps, because when you encounter one of these language barriers, often you really are at an impasse, a linguistic obstacle that without some outside intervention, there is just no getting around.

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A case in point, and an example that sticks in my mind to this day, is this beautiful, crumbling structure in the Everest region of Nepal, that was perched high up on a cliffside, many miles away from us. Even off in the distance, you could tell it was probably a very majestic edifice back in its heyday, but was now clearly very old and seemingly in disrepair. We wanted to know what it was.

After attempting to discuss it with our guide for the next several hours of our trek, and with much vigorous head shaking to alternately indicate both "Yeses" and "Nos" as needed, and with really only the words "monastery," "monk," and "winter" at our guide's disposal, we now know the following possibilities about this structure, with absolute uncertainty:

1. It is a monastery, and the monks go there to spend the winter, they are there now.

2. It is a monastery, but it's empty, because the monks leave there in the winter.

3. Because it is winter and the monks are there, we cannot go there.

4. The monks are not there, but we could go there if we wanted to, if only it wasn't winter.

5. There used to be monks there, but not anymore, they left many years ago after an especially harsh winter and never returned.

6. The monks aren't there yet, but they are on their way, hoping to get there before winter.

7. We can't go there, and neither can the monks, because the structure is not a monastery and never has been.

8. Also, winter.

This conversation, and hundreds more just like it, would reach such levels of confusion and exasperation, that several times we would collectively decide to just drop the subject altogether, often in an attempt to let emotions cool and keep everyone on speaking terms. Other times, we would seem so close to reaching some kind of agreement that we would keep at it for hours. Occasionally, our guide would even resurrect a topic days later, to try explaining it again in a different way, maybe with a new word he learned from another guide at one of the tea houses. But if it failed yet again the blow would be even more crushing, and he would get in a palpably foul mood, almost mad at us, as if we were purposefully being difficult. Purposefully trying not to understand him.

Luckily, combined with my big toothy smile, I knew just the gesture to cheer him up, and to communicate "Yes," "Happiness," and "You're Doing a good Job!" However, now I am starting to wonder if perhaps our guide kept getting in a foul mood because throughout this two-week trek through the Himalayas, sometimes multiple times a day, I kept telling him with both my thumbs to Go Fuck Himself.

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Read more about language barriers HERE, HERE and HERE!