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before i travelled to south america i took spanish evening classes to try and improve my language skills. they were unsurprisingly no help at all when i landed in rio and started my journey around brazil, spoken portuguese didn't sound close at all to what i had learned. having said that when i made it to argentina the following month i didn't fare that much better. accents and regional dialects combined with my basic level and it was a struggle to communicate. but with the exception of a couple of occasions i popped back into brazil, i spent the rest of my time in spanish speaking countries, so i definitely improved my proficiency. then towards the end of my trip i made it to the only english speaking country in south america: guyana. i was convinced that i could finally relax my language muscles and speak freely with everyone i met. i didn't anticipate that their version of english was so different to mine, and it was actually a creole language which i had zero experience of speaking or listening to. just looking at the wikipedia sample phrases illustrates my point, for example dem ah waan sting yuh waan bil translates to they usually want to take money from you. i'm not saying it doesn't make sense, but i'd never heard english spoken that way before, and i began to wish that everyone could go back to speaking spanish.

here's the original