si grazie ciao bene

I’ve spent a decent amount of time in Italy since I was a kid so, although I’m definitely not fluent, I can get by fairly easily. However, some of my friends here have, for the first time, been dumped into a country where very few words make sense. And by very few, I mean the words “si” “grazie” “ciao” “bene” exclusively. We have plenty of time to add a word or two to the vocabulary but for now, it’s wonderfully entertaining to watch my friends get by with just that. For example, we went out to get pizza last night at a restaurant by the Pantheon and it became clear very quickly that our waiter was going to hear a lot of the “si grazie ciao bene”. However limited, you might be surprised at how far that gets you. In any case, he was a great sport about it and the owner, Mickey, came out and brought us free dessert and a couple bottles of wine. For reasons we will never know, Mickey also brought out a case of tomatoes so that we could smell them. Standard. From there we moved on to a small bar that I frequented last semester and we hung out there for the rest of the night. Including some makeshift karaoke. I have video evidence of that but we’ll save that for a later time.

Essentially, the first week here has been fabulous and this semester is obviously going to follow suit. Something magical happens when you have good company and good food of which I’m surrounded by both, so I’m not worried about keeping it up. For whatever reason I can’t get the picture uploader to work on this business so I’ll just double up next time. Until then ragazz’!