my brain is mush

In the last couple of weeks, my brain has been exposed to languages in three different countries. When I first got to Turkey, I wanted to respond to everyone in Hindi. It made sense to me to respond in a language other than English since there's not so much English there, but the only one I had to go to was Hindi. (Totally unrelated: I have really got to learn some Spanish when I get back to the states)! By the time I started to get a handle on saying basic things like "hello, please, excuse me, thank you, how are you" it was time to go to Italy...not a lot of English there either. My brain kept trying to tell my mouth to use Hindi. Again, by the time I got used to saying "hello, please, thank you, yes/no, goodbye" in Italian, it was time to go back to Turkey for about 28 hours. Now my brain was trying to tell me to say things like "Si! Grazie! Arrivederci!"...which sounds nothing like Turkish. Then I got back to India yesterday, and I could finally use the Hindi that wanted to come out all along. The thing is after not thinking much about Hindi for two weeks, my brain kind of stalled when it was time to actually use it. I went to see my language tutor today and was having all kinds of problems reading the script. Eesh.

On a side note, I did get to use a little Hindi in both Istanbul and on the streets of Rome. Who knew?! And thank goodness for hand motions and that they're pretty much universal no matter what language you speak. And for nice people willing to help foreigners whether it's Turkish men carrying your suitcase up the stairs for you or Italians motioning how to get to your hotel. They make traveling more fun and interesting.