Jay Honeck schrieb:
Travelling on the metro in Spain is probably two orders of magnitude
than taking your son flying in a light plane. I find it odd that you're
fretting about this.

Oh, hell -- I wouldn't be letting him go to Spain if I was really worried.
I'm sure he'll be fine, as long as he can remember how to ask where the
bathroom is...

there are some basic differences as Europeans (not all, I'm
generalising) tend to be not so we-wee about sex etc, so we don't ask
for a bathroom (the bathroom is for taking a shower or brushing your
teeth etc.) but for the toilet (or other words to that effect). So there
might come the situation for your son where he is confronted with things
in public he might not see in the US like an openly displayed female
nude breast in advertising, nudity on TV before 8pm, breastfeeding in a
bus, etc. - I have no idea how you handle these things these days or
what changed in the last 5 years.
Not that we are all little perverts, but Europeans _tend_ to be more
open in these matters (generalising, again). Of course it might be the
case that he'll live in a rather conservative family and he might be
confronted with rather weired or old-fashioned views.

;-)

But I *do* find it aggravating and disconcerting that he's had to attend not
one, but THREE separate 2-hour classes on "how to behave in Spain" -- and
those instructions include basically hiding the fact that the kids are
American.

hm, who gave the instructions? People from Spain?

#m