The anomaly of accents. . .

Although I consider Great Britain to be my home country, my safe haven, I have often found myself completely baffled by accents that occupy certain towns and cities. One of the most disconcerting experiences I had was whilst I was visiting the great city of Glasgow. I was standing peacefully at a bus stop, awaiting a bus that was to take me to the airport. I was listening to some fabulous music on my iPod when a man approaches me and seemingly asks me a question. Due to fact that I was listening to my music, I did not hear or understand what had been said. I removed the headphones from my ears and aimed a friendly smile his way. He repeated the question. I blinked and then for lack of knowing what else to do I blinked again. I had not understood what he had said to me at all due to his very strong Scottish accent. He may as well have been speaking Greek for all I knew. I apologized and excused myself asking him to repeat what he had already repeated twice. He sighed and once again offered the sentence up for my understanding and once again it failed to be recognized by my now panicking brain. Once again I blinked and considered the fact that he may think that I had some mental deficiency. Having no response to offer up I shrugged and hoped that he would go away so that I could recover from this ordeal. He however had a different plan in mind and aimed some more words at me. I knew that this new statement was not the same as the first because the sounds were different but this was about all I could make of the situation. Again I had nothing to do but stare dejectedly at the floor and hope that it would defy the laws of physics and swallow me up. No such luck, the floor remained intact and the gentleman continued staring at me expecting an answer. Thankfully the women next to me came to our aid and responded to the questions of the man and then translated what had been said to me. It turned out that he was asking me whether this was the bus to the airport and my response to this being a shrug he then asked me where I was wanting to go because he thought that this was in fact the bus to the airport. So by the end of this encounter I was feeling fairly fragile and idiotic and he believed that I was a complete incompetent, overall a very successful conversation I thought.
Molly:0 and accents:1

To be continued . . .