Winged Language Lessons

A tale from my Traveling While Hearing days

Sometimes vacations just sneak up on me. They tackle me from behind, drag me off to the airport half packed, just knowing that I’ll need to buy toothpaste, tissues and socks somewhere along the way.

I found myself headed to Tuscany for a friend’s wedding. I knew no Italian, had been too busy to take a class and didn’t even have a phrase book on me. I really do prefer to have at least a few basic phrases down when I’m in a country where English isn’t the dominant language – you know, for the important stuff such as:

“Could you pour me some of that lovely Chianti.” 

This is generally followed by “please pour me more of that delightful Chianti, thank you” of course.

“Where can I buy socks?”

“When does the band start and could you possibly tip a bit more Chianti into my glass?”

I think you can get the drift, the mood here, eh?

I took my seat on the flight out of Boston, headed for Rome and found that my seat-mate was a very nice man, originally from the southern part of Italy. I’m not much for chat on flights but he was very gracious (nice too!) and willing to teach me a few key Italian phrases. I insisted that the first phrase should be “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Italian. Do you speak English?” I figured that, if I got language issues out of the way right off, I could get to the very important sock and wine needs.

I’m very bad at picking up other languages and this emergency, in-flight cramming session was no exception. I was lucky to remember these two very simple sentences and was quite proud of this major Donna achievement. When my fabulous friend Cynthia and her fiancé Giovanni came to pick me up at the airport I was, literally — seriously — jumping up and down with excitement in anticipation of showing off my brand new, major league language skill. //snort//

With all the pomp of a Shakespearean sonnet declaimed on the London stage, I pronounced my two sentences. There was surprise in my friend’s faces and then…then…they started laughing...a LOT. “What, what, what did I say? That was supposed to be “I’m sorry, I don’t speak Italian. Do you speak English?” Yes it was, Cynthia told me between gasps of laughter. I’d said precisely that but in a heavy Neapolitan accent.

Huh…waddya know. I had to laugh. Nothing at all wrong with sounding like a Neapolitan but, with the heavy accent and my looks, claims of language ignorance would come off as spectacularly disingenuous.

The next day, linguistically armed with phrasebooks and accent lessons from my pals, I was off to Florence for a couple of days before joining up with the rest of the wedding party in Pergine Val d’Arno, about 30 miles or so south of Firenze, in the olive tree studded hills of Tuscany.