We went to Paris for a couple of hours, ate brunch in Venice, then did some shopping in Luxor. When I looked at my watch, I realized we were going to have to walk fast to make it back to New York on time to check out of our hotel. It wasn't as far as you'd think, though: all of this was on the strip in Las Vegas.

We were finishing the first week of a trip to the U.S.A., with myself as the escort of two Japanese students. We didn't have much of a plan; I was just taking them to the places they wanted to go while trying to encourage them to utilize their English skills. We would have a home stay too, where they could use their conversational English while seeing American life firsthand.

After checking out of the hotel in Las Vegas, I ate lunch alone. The students were with me, of course, but somewhere in the Student Handbook to Being a Japanese Citizen, there is a rule that students on home stay are not to talk. We were like three Micronesian islands sitting at one table. I tried to make small talk with the other islands but, well, it's difficult to communicate with a deserted island. Although these girls were in the perfect language-learning environment, I was beginning to realize that because of cultural barriers, not language barriers, these students would never become fluent English speakers. It should have been easy to communicate -- we shared two common languages -- but no one did.