fascinating as always! How did you communicate with/ through your interpreter?
There's a movie, from the early 1960s or something, in which Jackie Gleason plays a deaf-and-dumb man, and befriends the son of a woman of easy virtue.
I've never seen the movie myself, and don't know it's name.
Anyway, I've been told I "act" like that with people new to me. And then after I get a few "bearings" from the body language (after all, each individual has his own body language, and so it requires that one be mega-multi-linguistic), it's much easier.
In the beginning, I had a 3x5 card with certain "key" words in Ukrainian/Russian-English, as did four other people; the same card.
But due to quickness of learning (both sides), those became superfluous.
As I "taught"--so-called--spoken English, apparently others tended to imitate me.
One time I met a Canadian who spoke with the interpreter, and complimented him on his good English. Upon learning that I had "taught" him, she turned to me, asking, "Oh, is that the Nebraska accent?"
No, I told her; that was the franksolich accent; people in Nebraska are generally known to have no accent.