I am sitting in a bar in Guardia Sanframondi, with Clare next to me, needleworking her 'funky tweed and duckdown supercoat' (in her words), as can be read in her post from today:
Slower than Slow - Fustrations with Hard FabricsRight now, my eyes are starting to get a bit blurry. It's probably caused by drinking a glass of spumante ( sparkling, white wine ) after a long day and an intense but mostly fun week, during which Clare and I spent several days on the road, exploring possible areas to live.
More on that in my previous post Slow House Hunting with Clare and Clare's similarly titled: Slow House-Hunting The bar is filled with noise, not just caused by the men playing on gambling/slot machines but also by the company at the table in front of us.
Both Italian and English are being spoken, the latter in all kinds of accents ( American, South African, Ukrainian and Italian ). After every glass of wine and beer that the people opposite of us consume ( they probably already had a couple of them before we arrived ), their words seem to make less sense. At the same time, their voices get louder and louder and they start joking and laughing more and more, partially due to them not always understanding each other. At least they have a 'goede dronk' ( as we would say in Dutch ). In other words, they don't turn into a-holes when drunk.
Anyhow, I was trying to write about language here.
I am now a little over a month in Italy and if I add the month that I was here before, from September to October last year, I have spent almost two months here. In those two months, I have mainly listened to a shitload of Italian. The easiest way for me to follow it, is when
@clareartista speaks. Not just because she is great at languages and knows how to explain them (much like me) but also because she speaks relatively slowly, with a clear voice and without much of an accent at all.
Although, perhaps, after almost half a year together, I don't pick up on the wee bit of Scottish in her Italian any longer.
Like used to be the case in Portugal ( and probably Spain before that ) and now in Italy, people - especially the natives - think that I don't understand or speak the language, when they first see me, as I don't look like them. They are mistaken though, as I am pretty good at listening and soak up information like a sponge ( when I am genuinely interested ).
I do like to surprise them with a couple of short sentences (in Italian), just before we leave a place or by placing an order after Clare has done the initial talking.
My knowledge or is it me speaking Italian? ;<) often makes them smile.
Language connects and people do like it when you speak their native tongue.
Italian is actually not that hard for me to follow, having lived 7 years in Portugal (2018 to this year) and having learnt Spanish in Spain ( in 2007 and 2009 ) and having spent half a year on Las Islas Canarias ( in 2016-17), where I worked on an unfortunately never finished feature film project.
Add to that 4 years of high school French and a dozen of Summer holidays spent in France, plus 5 years of Old Greek and 2 years of Latin in high school.
It's fair to say that I know how to learn a (Latin) language and can practically construct a sentence if I try hard enough, although I might mix a couple of them together in one single sentence, at times.
The only downside is being a (language) perfectionist and not liking to make mistakes/being aware of every mistake I make when I speak.
At the other hand, I have Clare on my side to correct me and I am always willing to improve, up my skills.
Loving (learning) languages helps a lot too.
TO BE CONVINUED...
All photos taken by the lovely Clare. The first one shows me at a roadside restaurant, on Valentine's Day. We weren't planning to have a romantic dinner as we don't buy into commercial 'holidays' but ended up in a steak house after a late night drive, famished and happy that they eventually found a free table for us on a busy night. The dinner was perfect.
