Excuse me, I'm an English speaker

The checkout girl was absentmindedly scanning my items while I was quietly patting myself on the back. I had managed to get through the two minute transaction without screwing up too badly when the girl turned to me and rattled off a question, bringing me back down to earth with a thud I swore could be heard across the universe.

I stared blankly at her with absolutely no idea about where to start translating what she had said.

There was an awkward two beat pause before:

"Oh, you do not speak French?" She immediately followed up with, a small laugh escaping her at the same time.

"Um, no. Sorry," I had to reply to my extreme embarrassment, quickly bagging my groceries so I could make a swift exit. It turns out she had simply asked if I had a loyalty card.

This was an all too common occurrence in my days in Paris. And eventually my vocabulary might have gotten to the point where I was able to go about my daily life in French and I was all over any questions about Australian beer. Just so long as no one asked my opinion about a book, movie or what I had done that day. But like every other English speaker in a foreign country my fall back was always sign language which was often-used and of exceptional quality by this point.

I will admit it, I was innately lazy about learning more simply because all my French lovelies were fluent in English, and in complete contradiction of all the cliches about Parisians the locals would more often than not swap to English when they heard my atrocious French accent. 

But chatting over 6am beers to two girls I had just met at a party was like another punch to the face. The conversation turned to languages; and they assumed straight away that because I was Australian I only spoke English. Fair point but not exactly what you want the first assumption to be, and equally embarrassing was their casual acceptance of this fact.

And this embarrassment has continued as The Boy and I continue our jaunts further into the east leaving behind any language we could slightly make sense of, and along with it our ability to say little more than hello and thank you. But what's worse is that as soon as our greetings have been heard we automatically get a reply in fluent English, a little humiliating when they are still in their teens and speaking what might be their third language.

So I just want to say right now on behalf of my kind everywhere.

I’m sorry but you’ll have to excuse me, I'm just an English speaker.