I have tons of these stories but I'll share one and two stories related but of a different kind. I am American but speak and can get by in several of languages. I went to international school so these kinds of things happened almost daily in high school, but "the night of two wing men" came when I was back for my 10 year reunion.

So for the reunion we had a huge group of people from all over bar hopping. We're in a big pub standing with two friends, a Russian (grew up in Belgium but always went to American schools) and a Nicaraguan (same thing, and his heritage is all Spanish and French so he's confusingly Caucasian) when some cute girl walks up and says, "Hey! some other Americans!". I start chatting her up when her friend comes over to rescue squad and starts speaking to her in French (from France) asking her where she wants to go because "this place and these guys are lame". My Russian friend switches to French and hops right in and let's her know that we are going to another bar down the street shortly, but there are a few other good places and asks how long they will be staying.

At this point a second rescue attempt is made, this time in Spanish. The Nicaraguan guy, being the hero he is, hops in to save the day and swoops up the Spanish girl. Our Russian friend doesn't speak Spanish well, but isn't phased and pulls the French girl to the side. We keep going back and forth and switching languages and these girls start getting really interested, especially since we "look American". The girl I was talking to keeps switching me and is totally perplexed as to how we are all keeping up. We ended up hanging all night and all three of us hooked up over the course of the trip. As it turns out, the first girl was Mexican American but living in Belgium and had met the other two girls during a study abroad in Spain, one was French and the other Spanish. The Russian still gets some visits from France if I'm not wrong.

A different type of story that I think is relevant was when I went to Tenerife, Spain. Since we always had such a huge variety of nationalities we used to frequently come up with fictional personas for the evening or weekend. One night I was out with the Nicaraguan from the other story's older brother and we got separated from the group. We were hanging out with some Irish people we met, the Nicaraguan guy was pretending to be Russian and I was pretending to be South African.

Close to 5am, totally wasted, this guy comes out of no where to join the group and they introduce him as "the South African friend we've been telling you about". They of course push him over to me and tell him that I'm his paisano. Mind you, at the time I spoke pretty good Dutch but absolutely zero Afrikaans, and he asks me some basic questions like what my name is and where I am from. I'm stumbling through it and I draw a blank on every single city in the whole country. Winging must be genetic in this family because my buddy comes through and says "he's from Johannasberg" just in time. I look at him and am like right! Joberg! We have a touch more small talk and the dude switches back to English and doesn't say a word to the group about me obviously not being a fellow Saffer. To this day I'm not sure if he passed it off as me being hammered or if he was just a lad, but I felt like a true champion stumbling through 5 or 6 sentences in a made up language and not getting called out on it.