...so there's that

I used extremely broken Spanish to direct a woman to Walgreens this morning. Was walking to the T and she said, “Excuse me….Walgreens?”…in English. A perfectly fine English sentence. So I explained to her that it’s just down the street on the left (we were in front of the fire station at Centre and Jackson). She then said, in English, “I don’t speak English”. Which is true, except for the 2 sentences she’s apparently memorized. I’ll grant you “I don’t speak English” is a useful one, but she’s not going to get much life out of “Excuse me….Walgreens”, well…unless she has constant medical problems and then “excuse me…hospital” might be more useful.

The one positive out of that exchange is that I relearned the word for “traffic signal”—semaforo. So there’s that.