English truly is the 21st-Century lingua franca. During my trip to Lake Baikal, we stayed at hostels and met people from all around the world. There were lots of French people, some guys from German, a Finn, a Serbian couple, and a few Russians and Ukrainians. But we were all able to communicate because everyone knew at least some English, and most people spoke it quite well.

When I was thinking about how to teach English last summer before I arrived in Russia, I thought that English would be so hard to teach and learn. Yes, there are some tough elements of English that a non-native speaker can never fully grasp (like articles or phrasal verbs), but English really is a simple language. We don't have grammatical gender or a case system, and our words don't have special endings that mark their function. Therefore, English is a very free language that is great at absorbing foreign words.

Also, non-native speakers of English outnumber native speakers. English is the language of international business and travel, enabling people from all over the world to communicate with each other. Imagine two Americans, a German, a Finn, and a Russian sitting in a kitchen in Irkutsk, Russia, having a conversation--without English this wouldn't have been possible. Here's a shot of an international group at our hostel in Listvyanka: