Thursday, December 18, 2003

Italian Experience

Talking about Italy in the previous post, I wanna jot down my funny experience in Italy. It began when me and my friend Benson, needed to find our own dinner that day in Rome. So we went around the streets nearby and found a restaurant with quite a good ambience and the chalkboard / blackboard or whateva you called it has some funky ads / items of the menu.

The shop was empty but a long strech of tables apparently seemed to be booked for the evening. When the waitress came to serve us, she brought the menus and waited for our orders. Whoa. The menu is written entirely in Italian. We can't even give a shot at guessing and deciphering the text. So we just return the menu and speak to the waitress in English. She then understood the situation and called her manager or boss to come. Learned a few Italian words during the conversation. We used hand gestures and single english words to communicate for our dinner. We spoke the word 'chicken' and use our arms moving like a chicken wing movement. Hahahaa. How pathetic. Eventually we succeeded in communicating our desires for our dinner. We ordered chicken = pollo. Coke = coke. and not forgetting spaghetti bolognese. I was surprised when the waitress pronounced "Spaghetti Bolognaise". It has a high tone / pitch at the syllable 'etti' and 'nese'. The 'e' are pronounced like in BM or in English like the word 'met'.

However, the is a glitch when we tried to ask for some soup. We put on a hand serving soup to ourselves in a holding spoon position. The boss says OK and he later brought fork and knife to our amusement and disappointment. kakakaka. What an experience.