I Take On A Foreign Accent

Being in Rome these past two weeks has really altered my person. I eat a lot of cheese, cheese which I cannot name. I've read a lot of Italian literature, which, as you might expect, is extremely depressing (nothing ever ends well for Italy, so why should they make it so in books?). I perused a haberdashery, a life long goal, and bought a 50 euro hat (1 euro=15000 Chinese yin, or 70 million tons of rice). I have also gained an accent.

It was Mircea, the Rufio-esque church friend with the Eastern Bloc nose, who first noticed it. I was talking to him in my national tongue, and he stopped me. He said he could not understand what I was saying. I tried again, switching to what little Italian I know. He stopped me again, and said that he could understand English fine; he couldn't understand my English, because I was speaking like a foreigner (not to be confused with Foreigner).

It's true. I find myself slipping down a slippery slope of linguistics, constantly rolling my r's, screwing up my grammar, and inserting frequent pauses, as if I'm translating from one language to another. In the back of my mind, I assume, the logic is that if I'm not able to speak Italian, the best way to appear non-American is to not be able to speak English.

And I say the back of my mind because it's all unconscious, like an internal mechanism meant to patronize the locals and separate myself from the college kids still here shopping. But if I can't control this, maybe one day I'll start speaking uncontrollable Italian.

I Make New Friends

Today I went to church. It's called the Rome Baptist Church; it's an English speaking church in the Piazza San Lorenzo. On the bottom floor of an apartment, the room has three rows of pews. I think today it was at capacity, at around 150.

Not everyone was American. In fact, very few of us were. There were three students, beside me, and a couple of tourists. The rest were from any number of nations, people who, like me, can't understand but a few words of Italian but still want the fellowship. That's why I went, by the way: I was lonely. I always thought I could live alone, with only myself and the people I invent, but that's not true. In fact, inventing people is rather unhealthy, and you last less long in isolation if you have imaginary friends. It's called going mad.

The best part was afterwards; two girls and a guy, all about the same age, who work in Rome, took the new students out to lunch and toured us around town (to sights we had already seen). I thought they were just being nice, but after talking a little I found that they were just as lonely as I. All their previous friends had gone home at the end of last semester.

Taina is from Finland, Esther from Switzerland, and Mircea (Mir-cha) from Romania. Tania can speak three languages, Mircea four, and Esther five. If time travel is ever invented, or if I ever get stuck in some sort of black hole anomaly that sends me back to ancient Greece, I'll be able to speak two languages. I was most excited about Mircea who kind of looks like Rufio, but with an eastern block nose. He tried to teach me Italian pick up lines (ciao, bella! bionda!), and kept catcalling girls way too young for him, but I guess that's a culture thing.

If you believe in this sort of thing, I think God answered a prayer.