Warning: Stereotypical teenager blogs about family. Read at own risk.

Over winter break, my mom had decided to take us down to Sunshine State Florida. We spent a couple days in the Universal and Disney theme parks. It was all very good and magical in the most wonderfully childish of sense, but my both my sister and mother said some things that just irked me.

So we're standing in line for a ride, and being a major theme park during the holiday season, there are naturally people from many other countries other than English speaking ones.I believe it was my mother who made a rather crude remark about how "this is America, you should know English". Like, what? My sister quickly agreed with her and I was absolutely flabbergasted. First of all: they're speaking to their own family and friends; not to you. Second of all: Would you learn French to go and visit Paris? I don't think so. They're here to have a good time and enjoy themselves. They were acting like we were the only English-speaking Caucasians in the entire park.

I don't know, it just really bothered me and I just keep thinking about a lot of Americans' sense that everyone should know English so that we can understand them; as opposed to us learning other languages. Many non-English countries learn English as a second language starting at a very young age. I know several Germans who know German, English, French, and Spanish and can speak the three languages that are not their native one rather well. I didn't start learning Spanish until the ninth grade and most of my sentences are very illiterate and literally the only phrase I use from my three years of learning that language is:
Donde esta?" Even when I am not asking where something is, I will still use it.

If I had a knack for languages, I would love to learn a bunch of them so as to break down the language barrier that separates me from gaining so much more knowledge. People from other cultures can teach us so much by just how they talk. My dream is to someday travel the world (or at least as much as I can of it), and learn and experience as much as I can. I want to be a writer someday, and I personally think that for me to be a better writer, I need to go out there and experience the world for a bit.

One final complaint about how I think my family is secretly racist: my mother hit an elderly Hispanic woman over the head with her suitcase (accidentally) as she was getting it out of the overhead compartment on our plane the other day. She apologized, seemingly sincere, then did nothing to help the fallen woman out and quickly exited the plane. I'm just really done with my family.