I just finished reading this book, Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier. It's a really good book. I recommend it to all. Anyway, I came across this little paragraph in the book:
My layover in Moscow was ten and a half hours. In the waiting room at the Sheremetyevo I terminal, I sat and waited, and sat and did nothing. For a while a teenage girl next to me was reading a book of short stories by Somerset Maugham. In English. Then she put it away and began to read Shakespeare's Julius Caesar (ditto). I hadn't wanted to bother her, but finally I asked, in Russian, what grade she was in. She said she was in the tenth. Here is something that would happen seldom or never in American air travel: in millions of air miles, you would be unlikely to sit next to an American tenth-grader reading, in any language, the stories of Somerset Maugham. I told the girl that. She seemed puzzled. "but it is very interesting for me,"she said.
So let me hear from you, American Expats. Do Europeans presume that you're ignorant when they find out you're an American ? Do they switch to English because they know damned well you're monolingual ? Do Europeans talk to you as though you were a child ? Have you ever shocked a European by actually knowing something ? Please share anecdotes in the comments.