"Imagine that, an American telling a guy who was born in Juarez, 'Chutzpah'."

This isn't so special. You probably ran into multilingual situations, because you ran into multilingual people, all over Europe.

Unlike what we do in America, the Europeans start their school children out on a second foreign language fairly early in their school careers. Then they often add a third and even a fourth later on, though they really shouldn't put it off but set aside a portion of each child's school day for immersion (and for teaching other subjects at the same time) in those languages from the first day they're in school. Immersion is painless (except to the whiny females who gave us "gentle"--and pointless--language acquisition delay in the form of the worthless but extremely expensive bilingual education plan in California.