Most places that I've travelled to I've been able to speak the language. Although in Northern Belgium, English is widely spoken, it is essentially a unilingual region when it comes to road signs, gas station and store messages. Flemish is basically Dutch, varying only slightly in dialect from what is spoken in Holland. Being a Germanic language, there are many similarities to German and also to English. This made for some very interesting linguistic reading games as we were driving along the various highways that form part of the very impressive freeway system here. We could understand many written words and sentences, but it was difficult to comprehend much of the spoken language, I knew before coming here that it was best to speak English in this region of Belgium as the French and Flemish do not get along generally.
The first thing we did when we picked up our rental car at the airport was to get the GPS going. We resisted the temptation to choose Flemish as the language of communication (OK, so I was outnumbered in my attempt to be immersed in the local language: I was thinking, Flemish in Flanders and French in Wallonia..). Common sense prevailed however and we now have a nice British English voice telling us where to go. We are back in kilometers and meters so that helps our Canadian minds to judge distances better. Now once we get used to the European drivers, then we'll be fine...
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