So, I’m a bit of a language nerd.  I love learning new languages!  When I was a baby, my mom took me down to Brazil to live with her parents when my dad was drafted to go to Vietnam.  Then again, when I was two years old, my family moved down to Brazil and my dad taught at the American School in Sao Paulo.  As a result, I know toddler Portuguese.

Fast forward to December 1987 when I was a junior in high school.  I mentioned to my parents that I was tired of living in a small town in Missouri and wanted a change of pace.  Two months later, my parents had jobs at the American School in Lisbon, Portugal.  I thought Portugal was in South America, but a consult with an encyclopedia at the local college library cleared things up.

Moving to Lisbon was life-changing.  The cultural experience broadened my horizons in ways that I never imagined.  I made friends from countries around the world.  I got reacquainted with Portuguese, and I learned how to navigate in a foreign country and a foreign language.

And then in college, I was a French major, because, why not learn another language?  As part of my French major, I spent my junior year in Aix-en-Provence, France, and all of my classes were taught in French by professors from the local university.  I still remember the sense of pride that I had when, during my first week in France, I went to the post office and exited with the exactly correct stamps that I needed in order to mail a postcard to my family in the U.S! 

I’m now studying Italian because there’s this Italy trip coming up.  I’ve been studying on and off (mostly off) for seven years, but it’s finally been sticking in my brain.  Chad studied Italian when we were dating in San Francisco, so I’m using his old Italian textbook to study.  The book was published circa 2002, so I’m learning some words that I will never need to know, such as “chalkboard” (lavagna, pronounced like “lasagna”) and “chalk” (which is the word “gesso” that I think a lot of us learned in elementary school art class). 

But I have also learned important words like:

• Hello – ciao
• Good morning – buon giorno
• Good afternoon – buona tarde
• Good evening – buona notte
• Please – per favore
• Thank you – grazie
• A beer please – una birra per favore
• A white wine – uno vino bianco
• A red wine – uno vino rosso
• a water – una aqua (frizzante is sparkling, naturale is still/tap)
• Can I get the check – il conto per favore
• Where is the bathroom – dov’e i servizi (but we now know that there might be another version of this, dialects and all)

We’ll be staying in a small town in Italy, and I have a  hunch that few people will speak English.  I’m hoping that I will get lots of opportunities to practice my language skills and impress people with my antique vocabulary words like “lavagna” and “gesso.”