Italianisms: Or The After-Effects of Angry Pasta

We charge our iPods by plugging them into the television and letting them hang. They look like $250 fruit swinging by a white vine from a TV-tree. When they are charged, Allison and I act like the monkeys and swoop in for the prize.

Ordering pizza resembles shopping for clothes. My favorite pizza place sells pizza a taglio, pizza by the cut. I walk into the tiny restaurant every day around 12:30, and point to the pizza I want. At this point in time, the pizza is huge and rectangular like a big lego block. The hurried workers place their cutters at one point. Qui? they ask. Here? Sometimes I say si, sometimes piu'. It's important to find the right fit.

They then weigh the pizza, hand me a receipt to give to the cashier and heat it up in the oven. The cashier, a stylin' dude in his late twenties with floppy hair, looks at the receipt and decides what would be easiest for him to charge. 3.86 euro? It's easier to charge 3.80 and just hand me twenty centesimi.

Often, we speak the most Italian to our camierieri (waiters) and cashiers. Some are awesome, like Davide. Davide resembles an aging Daniel Craig if Daniel Craig was skinny and had five kids and a good sense of humor. He asked us if we spoke Italian. Our answer: un po', a little. He told Nooreen brava for ordering white wine with her pasta and fish, and silently judged the rest of us for ordering Coke.

Davide told us he would memorize all of our names in five minutes. Fifteen minutes later (Roman time), he grabbed his coworker and said, Elena - Marranda - Maria - Gabriella - Nooreen. His co-worker then pointed to each of us in turn and said, Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday. We stayed an extra five minutes just to say good-bye to Davide.

Other times, our conversations are less fluent. Most of my grocery store talk goes like this:

Cashier: Ciao.
Me (trying to be Italian): Ciao.
Cashier: Tu vuoi un bag?
Me: Sorry?
Cashier: Tu vuoi un bag?
Me: Um, si. Sure. Si.
Cashier: Do you wanna bag?
Me: Yeah. Si.
Cashier: No. Too big (the denomination of the euro bill).
Me: No ho any smaller.

Cashier: mumbled curse in Italian

Our conversations with each other go similarly. After all, we'd be pazza to not go comprare that borsa that we just saw, it was blue and fifty percent in saldi and mio Dio did you dimenticare the compiti? Woops, you just got penne all'arrabbiata all over your giacca.

Studying abroad. Nothing like it.