London Culture and Multiculture Part 1: Overheard snippets

Sorry for stealing your series name idea, but it just fits what I want to do here too.

I've been in London (England) for nearly a month now, and frequently walk about on the streets of central London, or in the underground stations. It's pretty crowded here and it's easy to pick up what people walking nearby, or sitting nearby, are saying. Or it would be, if it were in English.

This is funny, since this is the first time in 7 years I've lived in an English-speaking country. Yet my ability to understand the conversations around me has not improved in the slightest. Here's why. Of the overheard snippets I've heard, a rough count would place the languages I hear as follows*

French	******	30%
Polish/Slavic	*****	25%
Arabic/Persian	****	20%
English	**	10%
Italian	**	10%
Other incl. Chinese / Japanese / Scandinavian	*	5%

*I am mostly in certain areas of town, so my distribution is likely skewed. And I can sometimes be wrong, too. And I haven't been counting formally.

**I have excluded conversations with ticket takers, checkout people, bank tellers, panhandlers, and the like, since they are invariably in English but that's not always the people's preferred language.

Now of course I would not expect a mix like this if I went as far as 10 km away from London's centre. But I would swear I never heard this much French in Toronto, even though it's an official language.

Gotta go. The lady next door is having noisy sex again.