English in South America

[sfbear]

Getting away from the Travel Agent Discussion, if I may be so bold.

We're doing the December 17th Valpariso to Buenos Aires cruise, spending a few days pre cruise in Santiago and post cruise in Buenos Aires. For those of you who have been there, can we expect that a fair amount of people will speak English? My Spanish is limited to High School (some 45 years ago) and is very rusty. We Americans are really at the bottom of the ladder when it comes to speaking more than one language.

Rich

[Jancruz]

[quote name='sfbear']Getting away from the Travel Agent Discussion, if I may be so bold.

We're doing the December 17th Valpariso to Buenos Aires cruise, spending a few days pre cruise in Santiago and post cruise in Buenos Aires. For those of you who have been there, can we expect that a fair amount of people will speak English? My Spanish is limited to High School (some 45 years ago) and is very rusty. We Americans are really at the bottom of the ladder when it comes to speaking more than one language.

Rich[/QUOTE]

Hi Rich,
Stu and I were there a few years ago and were pleasantly surprised that most spoke excellent English..had no problem at all..when we did, my HS Spanish was enough..
Jan
cruzunlimited

[valpojamie]

Hi there,

I have been living down in Valparaiso running a little cafe for 3 years now. My Spanish is coming along at a turtles pace and I do fine. There is defintely a limited amount of folks who speak english here. But most people are very friendly and try to help as best they can.

I picked up originally a little pocket sized spanish phrase book from Lonely Planet that has all of the variations for each of the south american countries. Quite good as, something as simple as, an avacado has different words from Mexico to down here in Chile.

Just start and end everything with Por favor and gracious and it goes a long ways!

By the way, does anyone have a link to the Insignia´s website as I am interested in trying to reach some of the crew in advance. Anyone know what nationality the major portion of the crew are?

Jamie in Valparasio