March 1, 2013
After three hours of dinner and conversation in an Italian
family’s home, I now know that laughter, lots of hand gestures, and torta
chocolate (chocolate lava cake) can transcend any language barrier. I went into
the family dinner tonight (along with Sara, Tyler, and Genevieve) and I really
only know a few phrases in Italian: “I like cats.” “Do you have a cat?” “I’m
sorry” “This is delicious” and a few ways to say hello and goodbye. So I was a
little nervous as the four of us walked up the steps to Alessandro’s sister’s
house (Alessandro is one of Gordon in Orvieto’s directors and he is our Italian
instructor). We awkwardly hung
around the door, waiting for it to open and then walked up a few stairs, where
we looked up to see three small children hanging over the landing above us:
“Ciao! Ciao! Ciao!” Alessandro’s sister, Alissa, kissed us hello and her
husband, Lucca, greeted us as well. We were told that Alissa could speak a good
amount of English, but might pretend not to know much. Alessandro also told us
that Lucca didn’t know much English. It was a little awkward at first, because
we had already used up all of the phrases we knew after the first five minutes
(good evening, my name is __________, nice to meet you, etc). The kids showed
us their room, all babbling in Italian at once. They didn’t seem to realize
that we couldn’t understand a word they said! We then entered the dining room
where the kids then began to run around, wrestle, and show us different movies
that they had (Cinderalla, Anastatia,
and Spirit – my personal favorite).
Dinner began and we had carbonara pasta, spinach, chicken, cauliflower, different
types of bread, and wine. We then finished the meal with the torta chocolate
and Alissa’s homemade limoncello. It was a little difficult to talk at first;
we just talked about siblings, what we were studying, and different places to
travel. Thankfully, Alissa knew a ton of English and were ending up talking
about everything about life in
Orvieto and differences from America. We arrived around 7:30pm and left at
11pm! During the first part of the meal, the oldest daughter, Chiarra, began to
show me some of her English workbook – she studies English for 2 hours a week. It
was so nice to be around some children again, even if they happened to be
yelling in Italian and running around the dinner table. While Chiarra read her
book to me, Francesco (5) and Maria (3) were chasing each other around the
table and wrestled. They were so cute!
Anyways, there’s a lot more I could write about because we
were there for over three hours and we learned so much Italian and about Italy
in general, but this is a brief summary of the evening. :) One of the best
things about Orvieto is that it’s a very small town, so we will see Lucca,
Alissa, Chiarra, Francesco, and Maria again – and see them often!
You will learn a lot of italian from the children for sure. One of the first things I learned from Heather's friends little boy was "Sono stanco! ( I am tired)
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