Last Days in Italy Part 4: Cultural Findings
I’m back in Evanston, and I think I need to wrap up this story before I completely kill it (if I haven’t already), so here are some funny “snidbits,” as my sister would call them, of italian culture.
1) Correction: I said earlier that my roommate was always using the hand gesture for “you’re busting my balls.” Not true. She was using the Sicilian hand gesture for “you’re busting my balls.” Northern Italy, and the Veneto in particular, have not only a separate dialect, but also a separate, but equally extensive, vocabulary of hand gestures. Apparently, in northern Italy, the same hand motion means “che palle,” or, “what balls!” Which roughly translates to the english phrase “what a drag” ( you can infer the connection yourselves), and is used when something is excessively boring or irritating. Below is a youtube video that explains “Che palle” and other useful and obscene phrases. The only difference is, Italians rarely say the words along with the gesture (because that would be redundant and not at all helpful to non-native speakers).
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jVCuyrPk7P4
2) A new kind of adventure in Italian cuisine: I tried all kinds of new and interesting foods in Italy (including wild boar, a tuscan specialty, pigeon, and about everything that can be made from a pumpkin with the exception of pie), but my most interesting italian meal was on my second day in the hospital. I had gotten to the ER around 5 and waited til 9, missing dinner, then been transported to a different hospital in the morning, skipping breakfast, so by lunch time I was starving. I got a sheet with different food choices, and without consulting a dictionary, picked some kind of chicken and some kind of vegetable. As it turns out, I picked chicken and vegetables “frullato,” which means… ground into an amorphous blob that’s easier for people with no teeth to eat. Not one of the first words one learns in college italian. Oops. So I tried to eat it with bread, but it was as disgusting as it sounded so I just gave up and waited til dinner.
3) Throughout the semester I had a lot of small, language-related revelations. For instance, “farfalle” means butterfly -> farfalle pasta. Cavatappi means corkscrew -> cavatappi pasta, etc. Finally, while I was talking to Elisa in the hospital, I was able to do the same thing to her. We had been talking about American doctor shows, which they watch, and scrubs in particular, and then we moved on to her trip America. She said she thought is was strange that American doctors wear what she called a sweatsuit outside of the hospital, and then asked what you call the things doctors wear. I told her they were called scrubs and it immediately clicked that that was the name of the tv show. You might have had to be there, but if you were, it was funny.
The End.
