1. Folks in tiny towns seem to have markedly more trouble understanding my attempts at speaking Italian than do folks in the bigger cities.
I thought it was a fluke but after a month in the sticks in a village so small it lacks even a single restaurant beyond a pizzeria I'm finding myself having to repeat myself two or three times in the simplest of linguistic transactions. I mean, last night in the pizzeria, I was ordering a pizza from a menu posted on a wall. By the way, amazingly pizza; they offered over 70 choices of toppings and a just great, thin crusted tasty pizza. but I digress.I literally only said:
"Buonasera, Vorrei due pizze. Un Verdure e un Casa," while half pointing at the huge wall menu 3 feet away where it listed, Verdure (veggie) and Casa (Speck, mox, pomodori). The young woman behind the counter looked perplexed.
"Que cosa?"
"Due pizze, Verdura e Casa."
What pizza do you want, she said? switching to English.
"Io vorrei un verdura pizza. verdura," I persisted, speaking a little slower and louder (apologies for beginning to act like a slightly boorish Americano). She still looked confused. I said it again, this time pointing directly and decidedly at the word Verdura on the menu.
"Oh Verduuura" E calda?"
"No, Casa, per favore. E due birra," again pointing directly at the word Casa on the menus listings and at the two beers I had pulled from the cooler She then seemed to get it and worked the cash register and told me it would be 18 euros. I paid and said grazie refusing to give up on communicating in Italian. Instead of the usual prego, I got a, "Thank you, and enjoy your meal."
After nearly three months of working on my language skills, I felt deflated and somewhat defeated. How could I have backslid so far from daily conversations at Bar Gianicolo and stores and museums and ristorantes across Roma, and even dreaming in Italian sometimes to not being able to do something as simple as ordering a pizza in Vado from a huge menu on the wall in a place that only sold pizza?
BTW, it was amazing pizza from that wood-fired oven. I love Wandy's pizzas:
Ok sure, my pronunciation of Verdura lacked a super emphasis on the U, more of a soft U as in <uh or ugh> and not the verdooora as she pronounced it. But it wasn't that far off and it was the only listing of the 70 or so beginning with a V or sounding anything like the word verdura.
Then after brooding about it for half a day - yes, I'm a brooder. It hit me. There were multiple factors at play here,
#1 Accent. I'm completely and enthusiastically self-taught. I don't hear my American accent but I'm certain it's as glaring to a native speaker as it would be to me If a person from France or Russia or Italy who is only just learning and experimenting with their self taught English to ask me for directions back on the street in Berkeley. My Italian has sometimes the wrong syllable emphasis, the American style of lazy and fluctuating vowel pronunciation and likely a half dozen other flags that I might never know until I fully immersed myself in the language for years.
And factor #2: In a small town in northern Italy where tourists are light, even in the high season, the young women behind the counter may have been caught off guard by my caveman Italian attempts at her language. Although it all sounded fine to me and I understood her well, I probably sounded to her like I was saying "voray oon pizzuh vohduhrah, par favore." Gobbeldy gook. Not her fault at all. In Rome, tourists are a year round, everyday event and not just from the US, but from all over the world. The Roman ear is used to hearing Germans and Brits and Americans mangle their language and their ears and minds are ready to do the internal translations. Not so much a young person working the cash register and phones at a small village pizzeria on a rainy Saturday night in January.
Update: two days later I'm in a cab in Bologna and the driver has zero problems understanding me and we even had a nice conversation when I asked about the different words for a train station and which was the correct one to use in certain situations. He told me and gently corrected my wrong pronunciation of Ferrovaria and earned himself a nice tip for his consigliere a mio provato la Iinqua Italiano, This totally supports my theory behind factor #2.
This most certainly explains why I've felt like pretty much every place I've been in during our time in the north, that people are staring at us. An Americano couple is a rare thing to find in a mountain town in the middle of January, and no amount of subterfuge will allow me to fully fit in the way I sometimes felt in Rome. Our accents and speech patterns must be explosively telling.
One other quick example stands out. In getting gas during a drive to Parma, far off the A1 or major highways, I pulled into a gas station. Almost all petrol stations have full service here and it's kind of nice not to have to jump out of your car in the cold and wind and rain to pump gas. I was ready with my window down when the attendant walked up and I said one word, one word as I had many other times to make my needs understood. Pieno. Full. I wanted him to fill up the tank to full. I said it before he fully got to my window as I knew from previous fill-ups he would walk up and say Pieno? and I would say, Si, Pieno per favore. Easy as pie,
It worked apparently with none of the pizza shop confusion. He said Prego and went about filling up my tank, taking my card and bringing me back my card with a receipt. He then said, Thank you, have a good day. Wow, busted as an Americano again from a single word. My accent must be atrocious. Hahahaa
Pro-tip for me going forward, be more careful as an E pronounced more like a soft I of an Uh or not pronouncing an I like EE, can dramatically change the word's meaning.
2. People in Italy don't know what a chopstick is or how to use it.
While driving across the Emilia-Romagna region today (lovely, btw), we got hungry and stopped at a place called Arte Cafe for lunch. Oddly, as we got closer we realized that in the small rural town, this was a Japanese restaurant, specializing in sushi. While I had zero interest in sushi, they DID have a pranzo un pressi, 3-course Italian food lunch special for a whopping 9 Euros. I couldn't pass up the chance to get a primi, scondi and contorno cooked by Japanese in a small farming village. So in we went. Friendly folks running the restaurant, all Japanese from the cooks to the servers. Obviously a famiglia ristorante. AND it was packed with locals for lunch. A very good sign.We both got the Italian plates prix-fixe menu and as we thought it would be, it was wonderful, prepared with art (It WAS the Arte Cafe) and was just flat out satisfying. As I wrote in an earlier post, that is what, to me, makes Italian cuisine so wonderful, every ristorante, regardless of location, large or small operates on such a high level that it's seemingly impossible to get a bad meal. I may one day have to write a book on searching for a sub-par eating experience in Italy. But again, I digress.
Like I said, the Art Cafe was full to bursting with locals having a Saturday lunch and from my rough estimate, not a single other table was having the un prezzo pranzo speciale. They were all having sushi rolls and nigiri. That's understandable. Everyone likes to dine off the reservation sometimes and the sushi did look awfully good. I just come from the Bay Area in California, the land of amazing sushi everywhere and I wasn't about to give up even a single of my Italian meals to something I can get any day at home.
The sushi was served on cute little wooden boats with sails and oars of chopsticks, but the thing I noted and I looked at nearly every table, was that not a single Local was using chopsticks. They were using knives and forks to carefully slice their rolls or nigiri into bite-sized chunks then forking them into their mouths. It wasn't a lack of skill I don't think. No one was even trying. I didn't see anyone actually take the chopsticks off the boats. I don't think they understood what they were for. It was just so odd to see them eating sushi rolls as if they were a filet mignon or saltimbocca.
I felt like standing up and holding a using your chopsticks seminar, but I was afraid no one would be able to understand anything I said. I know, I'm getting a syndrome about it.
A presto!
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