Meeting all the volunteers has certainly tested my geography, and theirs too apparently “the Eiffel Tower is in France right?”. I can’t laugh though with my “wait, there’s native Americans in Canada?”.
Not surprisingly we all speak English to each other, and I regularly forget it’s not most people’s first language as their level is so good. We sometimes try to speak in Spanish as we are all keen to learn, but that means by the time one of us finishes a sentence everyone else has forgotten what the conversation was about.
It’s been really interesting finding out the differences in the way we speak. I have found that no one outside the UK understands what time I mean if I say it’s half 11. They don’t know if I mean half past or half to. As I seem to be the only person in Peru with a watch this is regularly confusing.
The Americans and Canadians don’t seem to say “I’m gutted” or “I can’t be arsed/bothered”. This surprised me as I regularly can’t be bothered, in north America it seems you’d just have to be.
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