Living a Dream

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...

As I mentioned last time, people have asked me/us a lot of questions about living in Italy. Usually these questions are about the food and about our classes and we occasionally answer them. But living here is making us come up with questions of our own, and I'd like to share with you a few of them. Partly because they're interesting thoughts, partly because they contain a little more information about what it's like to live here in Milano. 1) What's going on with the opening hours of businesses? Several businesses - usually consumer-industry things like restaurants and small grocery stores - are known to close for an hour or two in the afternoon. It makes perfect sense with restaurants, as very few people will come in and do a meal between 3:00 and 5:00, but it seems a little stranger with markets to me. But there's more to this: There is a cafe around the corner from my house that is seemingly open all the time. It has been opened at 6:00 a.m. Saturday when we...