Wynette and I are in a foreign country, and I don’t mean Spain. It is hard to understand the signs. The menus are especially hard since they seem to have a language of their own. You see a different national flag.
I am speaking, of course, of Catalonia and Catalan. Many signs are only in Catalan, which seems to be a mixture of Spanish, French, and Italian, and maybe some Basque, who knows. The words have lots of Xx and double Ls. Often there are cognates with Spanish but they seem to be far enough off to be hard to get. We learned the Spanish menu words but they are useless for Catalan and often the dishes are something like partridge Catalan anyway which doesn’t give you much information.
The desk clerk at the hotel in Barcelona said that the schools teach only in Catalan. English and Spanish are taught as foreign languages. She wants her son to be a native Spanish speaker so he can easily live anywhere in Spain, so she has to work extra with him in Spanish.
I still have some high-school French so sometimes I am better at guessing the words than Wynette with her Spanish.