SJO was sitting in a “bowl” with weather all around. We did fly through some junk coming in and initiated a go-around.

Do the controllers speak English? Kinda. Enough to give vectors. You end up doing something unexpected like a go-around and they start to fumble some words. Definitely made a stressful situation even more stressful.

The CA was awesome and experienced so it was fine, but I could only imagine a new CA handling that situation. Definitely have to know what you’re doing.

Not that exciting lol

He was baiting you

this seems appropriate. Don’t be a Jaden
https://youtu.be/ZyDoN-PjGwg

I walked right into that one haha

Is that when you have worms in your mouth?

if you don't know

Does it beat the great orator who learned to speak with rocks in his mouth?

FWIW the SJO guys have always been easy peasy in my experience over there. Give me an ESL controller in Latin or South America any day. Give them respect and you get it back.

I'm not a Spanish speaker and always tell my Spanish speaking FO's, "If you need to speak Spanish to clarify something or keep us out of trouble, jump right in and don't ask my permission". If we're in a stack getting cleared one by one into BOG, it sure is nice to have the additional SA when you have a Spanish speaking FO tell me "Yeah, we just got screwed, they just put Avianca ahead of us". Can't do anything about it, but it's nice to be in the loop.

Pause one second too long to verify a taxiway marking in ATL or ORD and they send you home feeling like a student pilot that just got a scolding from his Riddle CFI.

This!

filler