>>My wife is from Peru, and her family is from Zaragoza, Spain. About 45 years ago we were at a Christmas Party, and we sat opposite a couple from El Salvador, who spoke Spanish to each other. They were extremely insulting to us and we remained quiet. Then the husband said to his wife that they had better be careful as it was possible that we could understand Spanish. The wife asked: ¿Habla usted español? My wife responded: No! Yo hablo castellano! At that point I stepped away from the table, laughing my head off, and took my wife with me. :) My wife is 5' 2", and I am 6' 7". I dislike seeing fur fly! My wife will not take anything from anyone.
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>For spanish, they should have known better. It's much more funny with hungarian, because Hungarians assume that when they move 50km from their border, nobody speaks the language. Make that 600km and they are absolutely sure.
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>The incident in case was much more benign, we were in a camp (with tents, very few trailers back then), and they were two tents away. I didn't speak hungarian yet, but my wife did - hell, she passed elementary and high school in that language - and they were rather loud so she heard practically everything. Then they approached us to ask for directions were to find the gasket for the pressure cooker, and my wife replied in hungarian. The next day, the neighborhood got really quiet.

My secretary Melinda, was Hungarian, and she was a little girl during WWII. She was living in her grandfathers house with her mother and sister, while her father was in the Hungarian Army, in Russia, serving as a Colonel in the artillery. Her grandfather was a medical doctor, and the Russians invaded taking over the country. The Russian soldiers broke into the grandfathers house and looked in all the rooms. When they came to the toilet, they threw a hand grenade into it and blew it up. They had never seen such a thing!

Melinda and her family members left their house and found their way to Austria, and finally were picked up by the British. Melinda said that no one was as cruel as the British! Her father spend many years in a Soviet Camp, and was finally released. She never got to see her father again.

One of my hobbies is photography. I set up equipment to copy photographs and Melinda gave me a 8" by 10" photo of her father with his men - about 120 men as I recall. I was able to capture and enlarge her father and two other men and made 8" by 10" copies. It was exactly 11 PM one evening when I snapped the photograph with my Pentax 6 by 7 cm camera with a special lens. When I got to work the next morning I told Melinda and showed her the enlargements. She was so happy, and told me that she had received a telephone call from Hungry at 11 PM the previous evening that her father had passed away.