What Do You Do When Everyone Speaks English?

I’ve got a new stamp in my passport!

Kuwait, as you may know, is a tiny country on the Persian Gulf next to Iraq and Saudi Arabia.

What am I doing here?

I’ve got a weekend meetup with some fellow entrepreneur travelers.

We’ll tour the mosques and old markets, eat local food, and talk about – what else? – business and travel.

I’m looking forward to it!

MY FIRST ARABIC

In the taxi from the airport to my hotel I asked the driver how to say “hello.”

It’s not so simple.

In fact, it’s not a word, it’s a sentence which means, “Peace be upon you.”

I practiced it a few times with the driver and later, with YouTube.

Today, I was finally ready to practice it on the street.

But whenever I walked into a restaurant or cafe, they took one look at me, knew I wasn’t a local, and said “Hello” in English.

What to do?