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Clutching my broken waffle cone as I returned to the Gelato place was embarrassing enough, but pouting as I held it up like a child, with cinnamon stickiness running down my knuckles as I belatedly remembered I couldn’t speak German, was worse. My brother and I were enjoying a bike ride on a sunny Tuesday evening along the river Main in Offenbach, Germany. A city bordering Frankfurt, it is a place of museums, culture, and rose bush-lined streets. He had been living abroad for a few years so he was fabulously fluent, and although I was learning a few sayings that every tourist aims to memorize, “I dropped my gelato” was not one of those sentences. So there I was, clutching the bottom half of my broken cone and reaching into my purse, babbling in English how I was such a fool and would like to buy another one. My brother stepped forward to translate when the woman behind the counter smiled, said something in German that I nodded to, and gave me a free scoop on a fresh cone. How did I know she was asking me if I wanted the same flavor? Or later when we met with some of my brother’s friends: how could I connect with Fabian, the blue-eyed boy who walked so close beside me? Neither of us spoke the other’s tongue, but breathing each other’s name seemed to be enough of an introduction, and then the universal language took over—the universal language of humanity. It is that universal language that so many people have forgotten to speak, or even remember exists. It’s the ability to look into the eyes, read the expression in one’s face, and simply understand. It’s not focusing on the language barrier, of the verbal words that spill out and how we don’t understand them specifically. It’s reading everything else about the person. Humans all speak this language in one way or another, for in all parts of the world movements speak the same thing: a frown with a shaking head is “no”, a finger on the lips is “silence, please”, and closing the eyes with the pouting of lips to a new handsome friend is always “kiss me!” This universal language can take us anywhere and everywhere, from bustling cities to remote villages. We speak it, feel it, breath it, and sigh it with every word and movement we do, yet suddenly its forgotten when we cross a border or are met with a custom foreign to our own. Our world has become obsessed with labeling everything and raising borders. When we are born we are given a name, a religion, a race, and a nationality. We are given a false identity and then told to defend it, sometimes even with our lives. I was reminded that on a global scale sometimes we may see the division, but on an individual scale all we see are people. Foolish people, mean people, generous people, boisterous people. We see people who give to strangers, or people who are shy at introductions; people who love, and people who scorn. I didn’t expect to find this language within myself, nor to be educated on how rich and fulfilling it is to speak it. But then again that’s why I travel. To feel the excitement of speaking this universal language and learning the language of the world. When you’re in a single spot with the same people they expect you to change to their definition of who you should be, but over the horizon and across the sea, you feel the wild heart of your soul set loose from such bondage. No longer are you merely a banker or an accountant, a Baptist or a Jew, or a person healing a broken heart and seeking new beginnings. You’re you. And sometimes it takes a brief moment of cinnamon sweetness, or getting lost in a set of pretty blue eyes, to reminds us of what it means to just be.... Human.