Jul

31

Italian Job

Filed Under Family & Friends, Food & Drinks, Humor, Language, Life & Leisure, Society & Culture, Travel/People & Places | 7 Comments


We were in Lugano last week for four days and three nights. In this trip, I realized that the only Italian words I knew were “Ciao” (Hello and good-bye) and “Signora” (Madam). I totally came ill prepared on the linguistic front to deal with the locals, thinking that my German, one of the Swiss national languages — there are four (German, French, Italian, and Romansch) — would suffice.

On our last night, for instance, I was not able to communicate at all with the nice chap manning the ice cream shop.

“Sprechen Sie Deutsch? (Do you speak German?)”

The young man shook his head.

I therefore relied on my English since my French is as rusty as my old bike, which I left in Manila. “Do you have some ice cream here that doesn’t taste too sweet?”

The man just looked back at me with a blank stare. It’s one of those lost-in-translation scenarios again, I thought.

My husband then tried to mediate. He then spoke in what I perceived as the most broken Italian in the world. It didn’t sound impressive.

But it somehow did the trick.

In Italian, the ice cream guy said that “everything’s sweet here” (a duh moment). (Well, I knew that; I just wanted to know if they had a flavor that would not affront my highly sensitive tonsils with too much sweetness.)

My husband then proceeded to ordering our ice cream: chocolate flavor for me and stracciatella for him.

“Grazie,” I thanked the guy when he handed to me a cone of poorly scooped chocolate ice cream. (I learned how to say “thank you” in Italian on my first day in Lugano. It was important to me to show appreciation to the Italian-speaking Swiss in their mother tongue.)

My ice cream tasted fine, but it was rather too sweet for my personal taste and a little bit on the heavy side. Its texture was rather unique: something akin to a chocolate cake dough put in the fridge for a long time. Interesting.

Outside the ice cream shop, I remarked to my husband that my basic knowledge of German was utterly useless in Lugano. “And one would think that these customer service people in a touristy place like Lugano would at least understand or speak in English,” I added, as we strolled on the sidewalk with our cones of ice cream.

“Well, they actually do,” he said, citing the woman at the reception desk at the wellness hotel and the one at the hotel information counter at the train station as prime examples. “But this guy seems to be the non-touristy type. I guess he just happens to work at the ice cream shop in the neighborhood.”

“Ah, okay,” I murmured as I mulled over the already long list of linguistic struggles I’ve had in multilingual Switzerland.

There was a pause for a moment.

I then cleared my throat and blurted out, “So, when do we migrate to New Zealand?”

May

23

‘Missing List’

Filed Under Books, Food & Drinks, General, Society & Culture, The Philippines | 14 Comments


I miss…

1. My pamangkins — my five-year-old niece Yannah and my three-year-old nephew Ethan (they were here in Switzerland for an eight-day tour last April)
2. My family, friends, and my lovely dog (R.I.P.)
3. Chocolate-chip flavored pancakes of Pancake House
4. Metro Manila malls
5. Press conferences and media familiarization trips
6. Playing board games with my siblings
7. Driving
8. Bohol (my favorite Philippine destination)
9. Tropical climate
10. Living in a house
11. Laundromat services
12. My home church in Alabang
13. Bank passbooks
14. Siopao and siomai at Hen-Lin
15. Eating Max’s Restaurant’s fried chicken (remember that Max’s is “the house that fried chicken built”)
16. Family reunions in my aunt’s holiday home in Tagaytay
17. Traveling extensively around the Philippines as a tourism writer
18. Pinoy sales ladies or customer service staff who call me “Ma’am” non-stop
19. Singing with my sister using my videoke microphone
20. Interacting with like-minded people
21. Affordable dental rates
22. My old weight
23. Reading newspapers in English
24. The hustle and bustle of the press room
25. Powerbooks and Book Sale
26. CHF1.00 = PHP45.00 exchange rate
27. Watching English programs on HBO, Discovery, and StarTV
28. Conversing freely in Tagalog and English
29. My photo albums and compilation of published articles
30. Graduate school notes and term papers
31. Having a househelp
32. Halo halo, bibingka, and pork barbecue (Pinoy recipe)
33. Buying cakes at Goldilocks or Red Ribbon for pasalubongs
34. Jollibee’s Chicken Joy
35. KFC chicken combo meals (just love the gravy there!)
36. Chocolate crinkles (can’t find them here)
37. My mom’s sinigang, tinolang manok, and spaghetti
38. Going to the cinema every week
39. Floating on the Dead Sea
40. A nice foot massage
41. Pairs of pants not worth CHF80.00 (PHP3,375.00) each
42. Being 22
43. Having a working SLR camera (almost all my cameras, except for my Polaroid camera and Canon point-and-shoot analog camera, are now broken)
44. Eating pasta goodies at Sbarro
45. Climbing trees
46. Entrepreneur Philippines magazine
47. Meaningful soul friendships
48. Teaching English in the Ukraine
49. Worry-free shopping escapades
50. Not having to speak German

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