You think you’ll be fine in a foreign country – unless you don’t actually pick up that instructional CD-and-phrasebook combo until the day before you go there.
 
That’s what happened to me when I went to Italy last month – and yet I learned how to say all kinds of things just on the flight over:  Things like “Have you a typewriter?”
 
“Fruit for me please!”
 
And, “I’ll have the pasta with squid’s ink!”
 
Venice Verona, Florence: everywhere we went I was eagerly confident, because doesn’t everyone say the language of Italy is easy and its people friendly and out-going?
 
I thought I was so smart I almost started having that nastily superior attitude Americans are so resented for, thinking “Wait, a trendy clothing store named ‘Bum’? A big-box store named “Bimbo,” with a picture of a giant winking baby on its sign?”
 
Based on my vague mastery of high-school French and Latin I was sure I could read all the road signs, just by recalling a couple of decades-old lessons and intuiting the rest.  
 
For example I saw many that said “Sit Down and Shut Up” - if the ‘ferm-’ root In Italian means to ‘close’ or to ‘shut’ as it does in French. Saw many with the word ‘subito’ in them which in Latin means ‘suddenly.’  (“These Italians sure love suspense!” was all I could think. )
 
Saw a picture of smiling young men on a billboard advertising inseminations – at least I thought that’s what they were advertising if my method was working on the words ‘insieme’ and ‘studiando.
 
I was just on top of it all; ready at every minute to yell “Ho Vomitato!” which to a moron like me is funny all by itself and basically means, “I pray you, kind hospital sir, I have felt the nauseation for all the day.”
 
’Ho’ meant ‘I’ is what I deduced, though I figured “Ho mal di testa” really meant  ‘I hate men’ rather than ‘I have a headache’ and could be useful in all sorts of situations.
 
I would have had one doozy of a headache during the four-hour opera we attended if things had gone according to plan.
 
The opera was “Tosca” and since one kind soul on the tour had slipped us all a plot summary ahead of time, I figured I was set to enjoy every gurgle and yelp, even up to the last moment in the tale, when, with almost everyone in the whole story dead, the leading lady herself makes her fatal jump from the parapet.
 
Also nowadays the words scroll past in a crawl-line above the stage so I figured I was more than ready to puzzle out every plot twist.
 
Instead, I looked at the opening ten lines, understood not a word and fell instantly asleep.
 
I managed to KEEP sleeping too- through the hour-long first act, vaguely waking to mingle with audience members smoking their brains out during the first 30 minute intermission; through the hour-long second act, waking again to inhale yet another half-hour of secondary smoke; even through the entire third act at the end of which my husband suddenly elbowed me and hissed “She jumped.”
 
“DOES THIS MEAN WE CAN LEAVE?” I yelled, startling awake from my coma and in the process teaching myself one very good lesson:
 
You can toss around bits of another country’s language all you want but that don’t necessarily mean you have picked up any culture!


See Terry’s writing daily and leave your own remarks for all to see by commenting at her blog “Exit Only” www.terrymarotta.wordpress.com  . Talk to her there by clicking on ‘comment’ at the top of any posting, or by going to www.terrymarotta.com , or writing her care of Ravenscroft Press, Box 270, Winchester, MA 01890.