The paradox of language choice

I love Wednesdays here. My only class starts at 5pm, so I get almost a mini-weekend in the middle of my week. I wake up late and usually spend the day cooking, cleaning, running errands or just sitting around listening to French radio.

So today I was walking around the downtown taking care of some stuff (getting cash for rent, obeying the French dentist's orders that I buy new toothpaste, etc) and I passed a store with South American jewelry and boxes calling to me from behind the glass. Luckily, my mother recently sent me all of my jewelry but couldn't fit the jewelry box in the package. A perfect excuse to feed my box habit, I figure. Plus, my birthday was a week ago. So I went in.

Little did I know that there would be major language complications waiting for me on the other side of the door. I have to admit that I've been bad the last few days; I've started hanging around a group of people of mixed nationalities, the key players being American, Irish, and Scottish. The problem, you see, is that all of these people speak English. Thus when I walked into the store I was surprised to find that my capacity to speak French had significantly dwindled since last week. The store owner was trying to explain something to me about the glass on a box that I was looking at and it was just not getting through. I was forced to explain that my French is terrible and that I wasn't understanding a word he was saying. He just sort of nodded and walked away, and I thought that would be the end of it.

After looking for a few more minutes I decided to buy the box with the mysteriously special glass and wordlessly indicated to the store owner that I had made my choice. As way of checkout chit-chat, he asked me if I spoke English (which, I might point out, is a ridiculous question. I can't even begin to describe to you how obviously American I am). I responded yes, and a bit of Spanish as well. This got him pretty excited, as he was from somewhere in Central or South America (the next few minutes confounded me enough that I didn't think to ask). He immediately switched gears on me and asked:

-Ud. habla espanol?

To which I replied:

-Erm, un poquito, oui.

That's about how the rest of our conversation went. It didn't help that he'd throw in a sentence or two of English every now and then. I somehow managed to stumble through about five minutes of conversation this way while he fought with the paper in the credit card machine. I'm still not sure how I accomplished this, it wasn't until this moment that I fully appreciated how disorienting it is to have someone speaking three separate languages at you simultaneously.

I walked out of the store absolutely braindead. A few hundred meters on the way back to my house I ran into a friend from class, a Taiwanese girl, and didn't have the mental capacity to understand that she was asking me where I'd been and whether I'd be in class later today. I still can't fully comprehend today's goings-on.

Lesson learned: Humans are meant to speak only one language at a time.