Fun (to me, at least) and perhaps tangentially related - I spent A LOT of time in Vigo, Spain (Well, Vigo, Galicia, as the locals would say) a few years ago -

Fun (to me, at least) and perhaps tangentially related - I spent A LOT of time in Vigo, Spain (Well, Vigo, Galicia, as the locals would say) a few years ago - my employer had a major delivery at one of the shipyards, and I volunteered to stay until we had it all sorted. Turned out to take way longer than expected. I started picking up quite a lot of what I assumed to be Spanish (this being Spain an'all) from being around the locals - and was able to make myself understood, too, after a fashion. Much to my surprise, I later found when trying out my recently-acquired Spanish skills in Madrid that I was mostly met with blank stares. In Lisbon, though, my mix of rudimentary Portuguese (picked up in Brazil and Mozambique) and the 'Spanish' I'd picked up in Vigo was well understood. And thus I found out that Galego was a distinct language, significantly more related to Portuguese than to Spanish.