I’ve begun to notice that after a few days of not being surrounded by fluent English speakers, I no longer sound like one myself. I speak with an accent and style incorporating some wild mix of Italian, Greek and Borat. Is nice! I use a lot of hand gestures and expressions. I drop all non-crtical words from my sentences and vocabulary. I even find that I sometimes incorporate the ambiguous Indian head wobble in an effort to communicate.

On a related note, I had my first opportunity to speak conversational German - at a Greek corner store in a neighborhood that seems to cater to Germans on holiday. My knowledge went about a far as “are you from Germany?” and something about how I studied German in middle school, and then I was again out of my depth and back to broken English and charades.