The highest language barrier country I’ve ever been is Russia. In Africa, Sudanese government didn’t like the U.S and prohibited teaching English at some year. But Sudanese speak better English than Russian who learned English in a school. Most of Russian I’ve met on the road even cannot (don’t want to??) speak number of 1,2,3 in English. So, it is not possible to have a police who can speak English. This situation made me to do depend on a local people who can spoke English well and blamed me all the time with many excuses.
When I was sexually harassed at the first day in Egypt, I had asked at many Egyptian facebook club to get help. At that time I got so many messages from Egyptians guys that “I am so sorry.” “I feel too shame.”, “We are struggling with this. I do wish everything would be good one day and you can cycle without problem in my country.” and so on.. But actually those guys who said sorry to me didn’t do any wrong thing to me. They were just very shame about their bad culture. But Russian.. they never feel shame, but blame a victim and feel sorry for an attacker.
People’s face was too gloomy. I’ve tried a lot to communicated with smiling on the road, but what I’ve got back was frown. Their accent was also like fighting that it was very strong. The worst part was people drove crazily. It was not about my feeling, but true fact. I felt dangerous to cycle all the time in Autumn and Winter in Russia. It was worse than Africa.