Living a Dream

I went into Whole Foods today because I occasionally like to pay an extra $5 for every item that Wal-Mart sells and I got a taste of nostalgia. I was in the diary aisle and saw yogurt drinks for the totally idiotic price of $4.59 and it took me back. As I've discussed with anyone who will read or listen, living in Italy was really cool. There were rough parts - transit strikes , language barriers, and the smell of dog pee almost everywhere - but there were obviously wonderful parts. Big, wonderful things like train travel, proximity to cool places, history, art, generous people, great food, and others were just part of our lives. I'm not going to talk about those big things. I want to talk about the little things that I miss about being in Europe. I'm starting with yogurt drinks. This may seem silly, but you know those little Dannon drinkable yogurts? They're 6-8 ounces and come in 4-packs? They're tasty, but they're not exactly filling. You can also get C...

Welcome to your intro-to-Italian class, where in a few paragraphs I will tell you the worst word in the entire language. A lot of you probably don't know many words in Italian, and the ones you do are the super-simple ones like ciao, arrividerci, grazie, prego, or similar things. You might've even heard words like "capisce" in Italian movies (pronounced cah-peesh-ay, not cah-peesh, for the record), or "mamma mia" instead of "oh my god" or something like that. Well, all of those get used, and I'm going to tell you a little more. "Prego" means everything. It can mean any of the following things: you're welcome, can I help you? Sorry, please, go ahead, can you repeat that? and more. Mamma mia sounds like a joke the first time you hear it, but it's real. And of course, there are the hand-motions. These things are real, and they're used to a funny degree. When Italians almost get into car accidents (which is literally e...