Aug

6

Leaning Tree

Filed Under Family & Friends, Humor, Migrant Life, Photography, Society & Culture, Travel/People & Places | 9 Comments


See that photo? Kids, don’t try this at home. I’m not accountable to your parents.

I spotted this leaning tree in the church yard on Monte San Salvatore in Lugano, and thought it would be cool to strike a ‘believable’ pose of me trying to uproot the tree with my bare hands.

The composition is not that great — my husband is not really a seasoned photographer — but I think the result of my spontaneous photo project looks basically okay. (Note: I’m going to use this photo as my new “ID photo” in lieu of my red winter socks photo that has been gracing my blog’s profile page for almost three years now.)

Just so you know: the picture is the visual depiction of “how hard” I try to integrate in our Swiss community. Yeah, right.

Let’s call it pseudo-integration.

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?”

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