Airplane

(Written while on Plane) - I’m on the airplane right now next to an Italian! I was a little shy at first due to my inadequate Italian, so I asked for her name in English. What I heard was “Marlbora”, kind of like the cigarette brand but a little more feminine. Looking back, it could have been “Marba”, “Marbury”, or anything really beginning with M and ending in A. In any case, she’s an Italian Phd student in Physics who was studying at Nashville for a few weeks, and from Nashville had a flight to Philly then back to Rome. I told her my Italian was bad but she encouraged me to try some. We ended up practicing some verbs (to do, to come, to see), and I could tell when my pronunciation was bad when she just said “okay”, as opposed to when my pronunciation was bearable and she said “yes! yes! yes!”. Typical. So, “okay” came to mean “not so much”. Fine in my book, I want and need the practice.

I asked her how she liked American food and she said that she didn’t even know what “American food” was, but that she liked the Indian and Chinese restaurants in her hotel in Nashville. I explained to her that I was a vegetarian but that I was maybe interested in having fish a few times in Italy. Then things got REALLY confusing. I forgot that in Italian when a c is followed by an e it’s a soft sound. Marcella is pronounced Mar-che-lla, not Mar-k-ella. I knew that rule but for some reason thought that there was an exception when there was an s before the c. S before c, though, just means a “sh” sound. So when I said the Italian word for fish (pesce), I was saying “pes-kay”, not “peshay” as I should have. Now, it turns out there is a fruit in Italian called pesco (pronounced pesko, peski in the plural), which is what she THOUGHT I was saying because of the hard c sound. So basically, in Italian I was saying…"I’m a vegetarian but when I’m in Italy I’m really thinking about trying this fruit!” That really threw her for a loop. I couldn’t get to the bottom of what a pesco is, she described it as a “round, orange summer fruit.” Maybe an orange? Anyway, I’m pretty good pals with Marlbora or whatever her name is. It’s probably a good thing that she’s asleep and not reading as I type this, though. ☺ Especially now that she thinks I’m a vegetarian who for some reason thinks oranges qualify as meat.


Well, now I'm at the Centro. Jet-lagged, overwhelmed, and really happy. Just took a few shots while strolling around, but now really have to hit the hay for a nice noon-time nap.


This is the view from my window. It's a nice sight. I very much like that curvy tree.











Here is my roommate Tim Platt. All smiles!