Bangladesh

The other day I was in the souq shopping and just trying to relieve a little stress when an interesting question was posed. To preface, I had already walked by these 2 guys who ran this shop and heard them talking about me in Arabic and so I just went into the store (if that's what you want to call it) across from theirs. I wouldn't normally go into a store when the guys running it are messing with me, but they looked like they had some things that I wanted, so I decided to suck it up and see what they had. When I walked in I understood what they were saying under their breath to each other in Arabic, but ignored it. And then they started with the 'I love you' 'I want to marry you' stuff in English. And so, instead of making a disgusted face and leaving, I just looked at them like they were speaking in jibberish and I had absolutely no idea what they were saying. After about 5 minutes of me ignoring them, one asked me 'are you from Bangladesh?'. Again, I just looked at him like he was the crazy one and the reason why we couldn't communicate, and then he looked at his friend and said 'maybe she's from Thailand'. At this point, I couldn't help but laugh, so I made my exit.

But I'm learning that this 'I don't speak your language' approach really does work and they'll stop messing with you once they think that you don't understand the language they're speaking...so I've decided to ask the men here to speak Spanish. I've put alot of thought into this one. Around here, it's really a 50/50 chance that the person you're speaking to speaks English, so I can't just say that I don't understand them. But, if after they rattle off a little inappropriate English, I can ask them (in Arabic) if they speak Spanish...that could really put a stop to things. Technically, I didn't lie by saying that I speak Spanish, but I'm fairly certain that no one here actually does and if they think that's the language I want to speak, maybe they just won't talk to me!!! I haven't tested out the Spanish approach, so I'll have to let ya know how it works.