I usually don’t talk to taxi drivers. But today he started it.

“Look, they didn’t get the roads done for Euro 2012, even though he promised he’d do everything! What will foreigners think when they see this? This is our home, what will they think of us? I’ll just be ashamed in front of foreigners!”

Well, if they do start talking, then I play along in turn:

“What do you have to be ashamed of? You’re not the one building these roads. You’re an upstanding citizen, working conscientiously as a taxi driver. By the way, how’s your English? Are you ready to work with foreign tourists?”

The taxi driver looked at me in fright through the rearview mirror. The awkward silence dragged on.

“Not very good, somehow. Why, is it hard to learn?”

When we stopped, we spent another five minutes or so talking about English. I warned him that the difficulty wouldn’t be learning words like “street,” “avenue,” “stadium,” “railway station,” but how foreigners would pronounce our toponyms like “50th Anniversary of the Komsomol,” “Donets-Zakharzhevsky,” “Uprising Square,” “Otakar Yarosh,” and others. Here, even seasoned Anglophiles won’t catch on the first try by ear which street a visiting tourist with a Dutch accent is trying to get to.

As for the shame: I doubt he’ll even wash his car by the start of the Championship, let alone learn English.