Friday, November 27, 2009
fraiser island
just got back from a pretty intense 3 days camping on fraiser island. fraiser is the world's largest sand island (weirdly enough, covered in reforests and fresh water lakes) and with no paved roads, everyone takes 4WD vehicles to drive on the beach and sand tracks through the inland. the hostels in rainbow beach (one of the two launching points for fraiser) sets up people into 2 groups of 11 people each to go into 2 4WD vehicles equipped with camping gear, food for 3 days, and not much else. we had a bit of tough luck on the first day with our vehicles but managed alright! saw some absolutely beautiful lakes on fraiser (the most stunning being lake mckenzie - wow) and had a blast bouncing around in the 4WD. only downside was that in my vehicle was a group of germans who (though fluent in english) spent the whole time speaking german to each other, and a group from holland who though also fluent in english spent the whole time speaking dutch to each other. really interesting dynamic there and gives some food for thought on international etiquette. i personally think its rude to do so but maybe im being culturally insensitive (shocking for an american, huh?) to expect people to speak english all the time. i can imagine people would miss speaking their native tongue, but it does give the people around them a really bad feeling of being excluded. thoughts?
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Hey Big! I definitely agree that it's not very polite to speak "your" language when you could speak a common language that everyone would understand, but after having spent a month in a country where I spend most of my time speaking German, I know that I jump at any chance I have to speak English. If I was traveling with a group of English-speaking people, I would probably prefer to speak English to them even if I knew I was in a situation where speaking German would mean that everyone could understand me. It's hard to be in a foreign country where you have to speak another language all the time. I'm glad you are OK after your hospital visit!!
ReplyDeletexoxo,
Little