One of the most wonderful but at the same time disconcerting things about traveling abroad as a native English speaker is discovering the extent to which English has become the lingua franca of our times. Wonderful, of course, because you already speak English and thus have the convenience of being able to communicate in many different countries without having to learn a single foreign language. Disconcerting for a variety of reasons, among them a complex of worries about imperialism (cultural and otherwise). And of course the extent to which English is spoken in the “non-English-speaking world” varies quite a bit from country to country, and within countries according to class and education.

Last summer I took a trip to St. Petersburg, Russia, that I managed to extend a bit with stays in Tallinn, Estonia, and Helsini, Finland. I had lived in eastern Ukraine in the early/mid-nineties, and while apparently St. Petersburg was never as dreary, decrepit, and isolated as the post-Soviet provincial capitals I have known, it has nevertheless undergone a rapid but incomplete transformation. In August it was filled with tourists from the United States, Western Europe, and the rest of Russia; we had all come for the absurd proliferation and grandeur of the churches, museums, palaces, fortresses, boulevards, and canals that make the core of the city one of the most stunning places I’ve ever been. Most of these tourist sites have been restored, and the center of the city is clean, filled with new businesses and restaurants.

Still, as much as the city caters to visitors, it seemed that it would be hard for a non-Russian speaker to have a satisfying trip without being part of an organized tour group. Many Russians spoke a bit of English, but not many spoke it at a conversational level. And most of the signs, even at tourist sites, were in Russian only — spooking people unfamiliar with the Cyrillic alphabet. I was glad I spoke Russian, however rusty my skills were.

Tallinn had a much higher concentration of tourists than St. Petersburg did. The center of Tallinn, the Old Town, is a gorgeous medieval city, with thick fortress walls, towers, churches, and old rowhouses lining crooked cobblestone streets. It’s packed with tourists, mostly from Western Europe, it seemed. The Baltic states have always looked West rather than East, and I found that more Estonians spoke English than had the Russians in St. Petersburg. Which was a good thing, because Estonian is a ridiculously hard language that nobody is going to learn. There’s also a sizable Russian minority in Estonia, and after years of being part of the Soviet empire even most Estonians speak some Russian. So I could fall back on that when someone didn’t speak English.

A quick ferry across the Baltic took me to Helsinki, where I was to catch my flight home the next day. I loved Helsinki, with its reassuring, bourgeois architecture and the pervading sense of relaxed, state-sponsored prosperity. And because Finnish is also a ridiculously hard language (and one of only a handful related to Estonian), and since the Finns are an educated people, everyone I met spoke at least passable English.

Whole countries full of people who speak fluent English as a second language create a whole new sense of uncanniness: I assume the Finns I met speak Finnish as fluently as I speak English (although of course I would never know it if the Finns were all butchering their own language all the time, having neglected their Finnish studies for English), but they also speak English almost as well as I do. They make it seem so effortless, yet I know that both Russia and the United States are chock-full of millions of monolingualists and people who speak a second language only with the greatest difficulty. Which brings up another worry about the global spread of English: It makes you feel stupid for not learning another language, even though you realize it wouln’t really make much sense to do so — since everyone else in the world seems so desperate to learn yours.

All of that is an oblique introduction to three photographs of signs I took on that trip to the Baltic region. The first requires translation, but the other two are delightfully universal.

The sign on the filthy façade marks St. Petersburg’s Museum of Hygiene (which I didn’t visit, though I’m told it’s fascinating).

I found this sign on the pier near the ferry terminal in Tallinn. Poetic, magical, and enigmatic.

And this one was apparently meant to mark a bumpy stretch of road in Helsinki, until someone used a magic marker to transform it into a bold feminist statement (right?). It’s signs like this that free us from the hegemony of the word.