2500 irregular verbs.

the marina grande

After four days in busy Napoli, we took an hour-or-so taxi ride to Sorrento. After a brief multi-lingual haggle over the price of the cab, in which our new landlady tried to intervene on our behalf, we started unpacking in our new apartment. I would call it a relatively spartan student-level place, but it does have everything we really need. I’m probably more comfortable than Ellen, but she’s really doing well. I mentioned that we have everything we really need: we don’t have a washer, a dryer or an oven. It is on what I would call the fourth floor, but of course in Europe the first floor is “0” so it’s a bit of a hike up three flights. Probably good for me after all the pizza, pasta, gelato, etc.

Sorrento is small, old, quaint, touristy. The high tourist season is over, but there are still plenty of sun-seeking British, German and Scandinavian people about. It means that most people here speak at least a smattering of English, so I often end up speaking stilted Italian and they answer back in much more fluent English. But people seem to appreciate the attempt. 

School is school. Four hours a day of desperately trying to learn Italian, so I can then desperately try to understand the chefs who’ll be teaching me how to make all of the delicious things I’ve been eating. That’s what I try to keep in mind when I inevitably lapse into Spanish in the middle of a sentence. Or when our otherwise lovely conversation teacher let slip the fact that the Italian language has two thousand five hundred irregular verbs. At least I already know most of the food vocab.

Something fun I’ve noticed (and often discussed with Ellen) is how much of class is devoted to food. Separate vocab lessons about going to a restaurant, going to a bar, what you find on the table at a restaurant. Conversation class has be variously devoted to what we like to eat, what we like to cook, what the typical dishes from our countries are. We’ve gotten our teachers off on some great tangents too: a description of the traditional meal served at Easter vs. that at Christmas (Someone might recall the Feast of the Seven Fishes at Hook. Apparently that really goes down, at least on the coast).

Ellen at our first lunch in Sorrento

Class usually starts with the teacher asking about what we did the night before. This immediately devolves into a description of dinner, a chorus of restaurant recommendations. Then we move on to the whole conjugation of verbs/memorization of vocabulary thing. Not so terrible, especially when the view from school is of the marina grande. So class is over by one, and then we go off to lunch.