On my cruise to Mexico, I found my biggest language barrier to be not with the Mexicans in Mexico (they all spoke very good English) but with the cruise ship employees.  They were from all sorts of different countries, and some of them did not speak English very well at all.  On my very first afternoon on the ship, I was sitting on the deck, and waiters were walking around with yummy looking mixed drinks full of skewers of fruit and little paper parasols.  The drinks were kind of expensive, 6.99 apiece, but I was on vacation, so why not have one?  A nice young man carrying a tray of these beverages came up to me as I sat at a table waiting for my husband to join me.  He held out the tray and said something to me in a questioning tone.  I had no idea what he said, but I figured he was asking me if I wanted a drink.  I asked him if I could charge the drink to my account, and I don’t think he understood me either.  Some people do think that Southerners speak a foreign language!  Again, he asked me something which I couldn’t understand, and I told him I’d like one of the specials.  He then continued talking to me, and I didn’t understand a single word.  I just nodded “yes.”  He stood there grinning at me, and I pulled out my ship card.  He quickly took it and wrote down my cabin number and handed me a receipt to sign.  I signed it, and he quickly walked off without giving me a drink from his tray.  I was shocked.  I looked at the receipt to make sure we had been talking about a drink, and I saw that I had been charged $19.00!  In the meantime, my husband came up and sat down, and I told him my sad story of spending $19.00 and getting nothing in return.  He just went off to the bar to get me a drink.  While he was gone, the waiter came back and plopped a bucket of ice holding 4 bottled beers down on my table, smiled, and hurried off.  So that’s what I had nodded “yes” to!  When my husband came back with my drink, he saw the beers and asked a guy at the table next to us if he was interested in buying some beers at a reduced price.  He explained that I had bought them because I couldn’t understand my waiter, and apparently my waiter couldn’t understand me.  So, he sold them to the group next to us for $10.00.  They were happy to get the reduced price (they had several buckets on their table already) and I was relieved to recover $10.00 of the $19.00 that I had wasted by ordering something neither of us would drink.  The epilogue to the story is that I came back out on the deck to read a book two days later, and the same group of drinkers were sitting in exactly the same place!  And they still had several of those buckets of beers!