Studying, kind of.

It's a rainy day here in Bologna. I'm sitting in the closest thing they have to an American coffee shop. I can already hear people saying, "What are you doing in an American coffee shop?! You should be immersing yourself in the Italian culture and going to the most Italian coffee shops that you can find." (Or maybe that's just my inner Jiminy Cricket.) Well, you don't sit and study in Italian cafés, and I can't get wifi at the University Library. It's there, I just can't figure it out (and not because I haven't asked). And it's nice to have a little bit of America every once in a while. Sometimes it's almost an overload of America, as I heard Johnny Cash's song 'How high's the water, Mama?". But here I am, trying to start writing an Italian paper that's due tomorrow. Well, kind of trying.

Another one of my favorite places to study is the Italian bookshop. They have tables and chairs and they always have the heater on! During one of my study breaks, I picked up a book called something like "Learn English Fast". I flipped to a random page that had English idioms. There's nothing like seeing your own idiomatic phrases through someone else's lenses. For example, a rough translation, "The Bee's Knees: the best. What does the knees of the bees have to do with being the best? Absolutely nothing!" Well, they have a point.

P as in Pneumonia. For anyone who hasn't seen Brian Regan's skit about this, you need to watch it right now: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c-s1wYFwdD4 And if you have all day, just watch everything he does. I had a p as in pneumonia experience at the Apple Store. My computer was having difficulties, so I took it to the Apple Store here in Bologna. I speak a little Italian, and I knew some people would be able to speak English. (My Italian is getting better, but I wasn't sure I knew computer terms in Italian--they usually turn out to be the same word as it is in English, just with such a strong Italian accent that you can't understand what they are saying.) So I was talking to them in a kind of English/Italian mix. At one point, they asked for my first and last name. All my life, I have spelled my last name for people by saying B as in boy so that my last name doesn't turn out to be Toles or Doles or Coles. So that's what I said to the Apple man. But then I realized that that was probably incredibly unhelpful to a native Italian speaker, and I should have chosen an Italian word that starts with b. But of course, my mind went totally blank and I couldn't think of a single word in Italian that started with b, not even bambino (funny enough, it means boy).

And that's not the only stupid mistake I've made (imagine that). I checked out the book Jane Eyre from the library and took it home. I opened it up and found that the forward by Virginia Woolf was in Italian. I didn't know she knew Italian! But I don't usually read forwards, and especially not when they are in Italian. So I skipped ahead to the (what I thought was English) story. But wait, the story was in Italian too. What?! Oh yeah, I rented it from an Italian library, of course it's in Italian. I know, I know. In my defense, it was in the Lit section (short for literature) not the Let section (short for Leteratura).

Speaking of translating English works, I saw the Hobbit for the first time… in Italian. I'm sure it's better in English because Dwarves speaking Italian doesn't really work. And translating from Elvish to Italian to English is a little difficult.
OK, I'm really going to study now.