I'm sitting in a basement classroom next to another American, conjugating the past perfect tense of to be in my new Italian workbook. Barbara the Brazilian student, sitting on my other side, has already finished and is writing a shopping list in Italian. I'm stuck on the second person plural; M. from Alabama is looking at the pasta diagram on the wall. She appears to be stuck, too.
For reasons I can't exactly understand, taking Italian lessons twice a week is a condition of my stay in Italy. This is my second visit to the basement classroom on Via Bramante, just off the metro stop Piramide, and I feel M. and I may be kindred spirits. I've already memorized the pasta diagram.
Barbara reminds Ernesto, our tutor, that her time is valuable and she has night classes at physical therapy school, so can we hurry it up please? It's only noon. I think this is the point where I start to hate Barbara. Or at least her mastery of multiple languages.
Ernesto is a graduate student who looks like the actor Jeff Goldblum and gripes about American politics between verb exercises. He has a spectacular ponytail. It's clear from the way he talks with Barbara only, in fluent Italian, that he sees little potential in M. and me. We don't mind much.
M. is an au pair, too. She's caregiver for twin boys the same age as the triplets I take care of. Currently we're prisoners to Barbara and Ernesto's conversation in this weird basement with cinder block walls, dreading being called on.
I missed the first two weeks of class, so I have no concept of conversational Italian. I'm learning to conjugate verbs, but I still can't tell time. I've been relying on the children to teach me my numbers and days of the week at bath time. Teaching me how to translate objects in the bathroom delights them to no end. I came all the way from America, I'm a grown up and everything, and I don't know how to say my own phone number? Wow.
Who knew there were so many kinds of pasta, and they all had a name? Gnocchi, rotelle, farfalle.
I gaze back at my workbook, where I've filled in about five of the ten odd blanks and covered the margins with doodles of curlicues. It's going to take me all day at this rate.
Wednesday, January 13, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
Q: Is there life after Italian coffee?
Today I was at Starbucks with my grandpa getting coffee (a shared hobby, I guess). I ordered a tall cappuccino and the guy asked me if I'd ever had real cappuccino before. I said, yes. He paused, then continued,
"Well, it's a little different from the kind where you push the cup against the machine thing."
"Like...BP coffee?" I asked. What did this guy take me for? A dazed teenager straggling in from the Hollister next door, popping in for a peppermint frappucinno? At which point I felt kind of deflated, after being in coffee withdrawal for quite some time now. I miss everything about drinking coffee in Italy--the smells of brewing espresso, the sound of customers chinking their cups and talking--sigh. Meanwhile the guy was eying me intensely, practically willing me to order something frilly via ESP.
"I think I'll just go with the cappuccino, thanks though."
"Hey, it's whatever you want." Smirk.
So, is this coffee habit really worth all that grief? Is there life after Italian coffee?
A: Yes. No...depends on how far you are willing to go to recreate the fantastic experience of Il cafe Italiana, authentic Italian coffee.
You have options. If you find yourself, as I was when I left au pair world, suddenly without access to espresso and its tasty offshoots, you have options. You can
1. Drag yourself to Starbucks at one of its two equally awkward locations in the Western KY area (a hospital or the mall--would you rather fight through throngs of hospital personnel, or actual dazed teenage girls straggling in from Claire's and Hollister? yikes)for your morning fix
2. Invest in a quality espresso machine and those tiny cups, as well as hard-to-find Lavazzo espresso packets, and learn to make it yourself
3. Learn to drink your regular coffee black, if you haven't already--you get more of a coffee taste and less of a finicky coffee-doctoring habit
4. Like # 2, but cheaper: buy a stove top percolator designed for espresso, and find bags of espresso at drugstores, and learn to make the coffee without burning it
5. Adopt a new habit to get your morning energy fix. Draw your own conclusions
6. Pine and sigh
7. Embrace McCafe (it's hit and miss)
(Note: If and when you find yourself in Rome looking for a cup of coffee, good news: almost any cafe or restaurant you choose will have great coffee. Choose one. Go inside, survey the layout (expect to pay the cashier at one end of the bar, and then receive your order at the other), and order. Espresso is cafe. Cappuccino, if you should crave it, is strictly a morning drink for Italians. Expect to be outed as a tourist if you order it any later. As a rule, the less swamped by tourists, the less expensive and more authentic the place will be. A place that is full of locals is usually synonymous with a great find. Get your coffee, take a whiff of that fresh espresso, and enjoy.)
"Well, it's a little different from the kind where you push the cup against the machine thing."
"Like...BP coffee?" I asked. What did this guy take me for? A dazed teenager straggling in from the Hollister next door, popping in for a peppermint frappucinno? At which point I felt kind of deflated, after being in coffee withdrawal for quite some time now. I miss everything about drinking coffee in Italy--the smells of brewing espresso, the sound of customers chinking their cups and talking--sigh. Meanwhile the guy was eying me intensely, practically willing me to order something frilly via ESP.
"I think I'll just go with the cappuccino, thanks though."
"Hey, it's whatever you want." Smirk.
So, is this coffee habit really worth all that grief? Is there life after Italian coffee?
A: Yes. No...depends on how far you are willing to go to recreate the fantastic experience of Il cafe Italiana, authentic Italian coffee.
You have options. If you find yourself, as I was when I left au pair world, suddenly without access to espresso and its tasty offshoots, you have options. You can
1. Drag yourself to Starbucks at one of its two equally awkward locations in the Western KY area (a hospital or the mall--would you rather fight through throngs of hospital personnel, or actual dazed teenage girls straggling in from Claire's and Hollister? yikes)for your morning fix
2. Invest in a quality espresso machine and those tiny cups, as well as hard-to-find Lavazzo espresso packets, and learn to make it yourself
3. Learn to drink your regular coffee black, if you haven't already--you get more of a coffee taste and less of a finicky coffee-doctoring habit
4. Like # 2, but cheaper: buy a stove top percolator designed for espresso, and find bags of espresso at drugstores, and learn to make the coffee without burning it
5. Adopt a new habit to get your morning energy fix. Draw your own conclusions
6. Pine and sigh
7. Embrace McCafe (it's hit and miss)
(Note: If and when you find yourself in Rome looking for a cup of coffee, good news: almost any cafe or restaurant you choose will have great coffee. Choose one. Go inside, survey the layout (expect to pay the cashier at one end of the bar, and then receive your order at the other), and order. Espresso is cafe. Cappuccino, if you should crave it, is strictly a morning drink for Italians. Expect to be outed as a tourist if you order it any later. As a rule, the less swamped by tourists, the less expensive and more authentic the place will be. A place that is full of locals is usually synonymous with a great find. Get your coffee, take a whiff of that fresh espresso, and enjoy.)
Thursday, January 7, 2010
have passport, will travel part 1
l'au pair americana, the american au pair.
I moved to Rome, Italy in the winter of 2008 as a live-in nanny, or au pair, to an Italian family. Besides please and thank you, I only knew three other words in Italian: Via Anapo 29 (ventinove), the street address of the family I agreed to work for.
I had submitted an application to an au pair agency out of Nova Scotia in October, and then waited anxiously for a reply. I had moved back home with my parents after graduating college five months before, and with little variation to my daily schedule, needed a serious change. To me, staying at home for an indefinite stretch of time was synonymous with stifling the creative spirit and/or dying an old maid in our depressing basement. So I convinced the director of my graduate creative writing program at MSU that I would meet all my semester requirements as I was living and working in Italy. And I tried to downplay the part where the children I would be taking care of were triplets, age six. Never mind that not only could I not speak Italian, I had never really babysat. If I survived, it would make one hell of a story.
So I ordered my schoolbooks, packed two suitcases with everything I thought I'd need for six months abroad, and settled my arrival date with the signora who would be my host mother.
Then I flew to Italy.
I moved to Rome, Italy in the winter of 2008 as a live-in nanny, or au pair, to an Italian family. Besides please and thank you, I only knew three other words in Italian: Via Anapo 29 (ventinove), the street address of the family I agreed to work for.
I had submitted an application to an au pair agency out of Nova Scotia in October, and then waited anxiously for a reply. I had moved back home with my parents after graduating college five months before, and with little variation to my daily schedule, needed a serious change. To me, staying at home for an indefinite stretch of time was synonymous with stifling the creative spirit and/or dying an old maid in our depressing basement. So I convinced the director of my graduate creative writing program at MSU that I would meet all my semester requirements as I was living and working in Italy. And I tried to downplay the part where the children I would be taking care of were triplets, age six. Never mind that not only could I not speak Italian, I had never really babysat. If I survived, it would make one hell of a story.
So I ordered my schoolbooks, packed two suitcases with everything I thought I'd need for six months abroad, and settled my arrival date with the signora who would be my host mother.
Then I flew to Italy.
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