One of the things that is always striking to us in Venice is how much English we hear on the streets, from both Americans and British speakers. Or at least those are the accents we hear when we overhear people speaking English in Venice.

It was actually much more striking when we lived in Bolzano, where we rarely heard anybody speaking in English of any sort. But Venice is a tourist mecca — we ourselves were there as tourists, after all — and so you hear all kinds of languages, because there are all kinds of tourists in town.

BTW, Chris speaks many languages well, and he was taken for a German tourist while we were in Venice when speaking in Italian. It was funny – his Italian wasn’t quite good enough to be mistaken for an Italian, but it was clearly too good for him to possibly be an American. Even though he was married to one – the same person who thought he was German (when he was speaking Italian) thought I was American (when I was speaking Italian).

But I digress.

Anyway, we heard a bunch of English on the trip, and here are a couple of choice overheard exchanges:

1. Mother to ~10-year-old kid, said while walking down the street:

—“I was not drunk last night!”

2. Teenage girl with a British accent who was sitting on a bench in the Campo San Stefano and using her netbook to chat (via Skype, perhaps) with her mother:

— “When you’re overseas, you know who your friends really are!”

— “Anna is a complete write-off. I don’t even friend her on Facebook anymore!”

even later, said with all the steadfast determination of a young teenager:

— “when I go back, I’ll stay put for good!”

Of course, I wonder what these folks may have written down to put on their own blogs of the things they overheard us say …