Here's a funny beggar story. When I visited Paris with People to People, there were a lot of Muslim looking women who ALL asked the same question. "Do you speak English?" If you said "Yes", they would hand you a piece of paper with a sad story written in English so you would feel sorry for them and their made up life and donate money to them. One was about how her brother had died and now their family was somehow poorer. That doesn't make sense to me... how could one less mouth to feed make a family ever more poor? Anyway, we all knew they were fakes. Here's the funny part though. Once, a woman came up asking the question while we were having a conversation... IN ENGLISH! One of my friends said, "Uh... no hablo ingles." in his very real sounding Mexican accent. And she responded in Spanish. We were like, "Oh, crap..." and we just had to walk away cause we had run out of non English languages. I could've done some German, but I didn't feel like it. She probably knew that language too.

Yeah, I had a similar story in Italy. There are these women who sit hunched over under a thick blanket with bowls in front of them. One of them had another woman who started speaking to me first in Italian, then English, and when I started speaking French she knew it. It's amazing how people that are so... poor, know so many languages. I'm sure that if I had tried another language, such as Spanish, she would have known it as well.