Passage 2 When I lived in Spain, some Spanish friends of mine decided to visit England by car. Before they left, they asked me for advice about how to find accommodation. I suggested that they should stay at ‘ bed and breakfast ’ houses, because this kind of accommodation gives a foreign visitor a good chance to speak English with the family. My friends listened to my advice, but they came back with some funny stories. “ We didn ’ t stay at bed and breakfast houses, ” they said, “ because we found that most families were away on holiday. ” I thought this was strange. Finally I understood what had happened. My friends spoke little English, and they thought ‘ VACANCIES ’ meant ‘ holidays ’ , because the Spanish word for ‘ holidays ” is ‘ vacaciones ’ . So they did not go to house where the sign outside said ‘ VACANCLES ’ , which in English means there are free rooms. Then my friends went to house where the sign said ‘ NO VACANCLES ’ , because they thought this meant the people who owned the house were not away on holiday. But they found that these houses were all full. As a result, they stayed at hotels! We laughed about this and about mistakes my friends made in reading other signs. In Spanish, the word ‘ DIVERSION ’ means fun. In English, it means that workmen are repairing the road, and that you must take a different road. When my friends saw the word ‘ DIVERSION ’ on a road sign, they thought they were going to have fun. Instead, the road ended in a large hold. English people have problems too when they learn foreign languages. Once in Paris. when someone offered me some more. coffee, I said ‘ Thank you ’ in French. I meant that I would like some more, However , to my surprise the coffee pot was taken away! Later I found out that ‘ Thank you ’ in French means ‘ Mo, thank you. ’ My Spanish friends wanted advice about ______.