Advice: The most important word to learn before you go to a foreign country is not, “bathroom” or “check” or “beer” or whatnot. It’s “language.” The word for language in Spanish is idioma.

I have observed that greater than half of all computer kiosks and city info web pages in Spain have a way to switch the language to English. Probably 80% of these, however, tell you in Spanish how to change the language. It’s so universal, it’s pretty funny. And there’s usually very little in a phrasebook for the totally uneducated that would help you find the change language feature.

Now, some of the kiosks are disasters even when switched to English. One of the ATMs we tried to use had options in English, but error messages all in Spanish, so we couldn’t figure out what it thought we had done wrong. Fortunately, all the money didn’t drain out of the account or anything :).