As usual next door for the Cyprus Sunday paper. And spot, as last week, Friend of the Hotel round the corner of the maze approach to the newsstand engrossed in a paper. Last week my assumption was that he had to sample copiously in order to choose which newspaper to buy. Now I wonder whether purchase is ever the intent. So inside with the Sunday Mail and hand over the €1.80. A man I don’t recognise on the till smiles and says “Thank you. Спасибо.” [Thank you in Russian. Roughly transliterates as spasseeba].
Meaning the clerk was unsure whether I was English or Russian. Although English would frequently be used for clearly non-Anglos simply because it’s such a common second language. A Norwegian dealing with a Greek Cypriot tourist facility would normally use English. But does raise the interesting question of how those universal multilingualists the taxi drivers of the world know which language to try first - and they’re usually right. So in Eastern Europe as the Communist era was ending it’s not hard to see why a Pole would guess from the Birkenstocks that I wasn’t Polish. Even if the rest of my clothes didn’t betray me, expensive sandals would have done. But how did they know I wasn’t German? Or Finnish. Though if they’d guessed Finnish, singularly non Indo European, we might well have been back to let’s all speak English.