Tag: italian

Giving Thanks for Travel

Posted on by
IMG_5334

Train stations are so much cooler than airports!

Wow, I can’t help but be thankful for this amazing year. Foremost, I’m thankful it happened at all. It could have remained a dream forever. Instead, it became an actual goal and then reality.

And it could have been awful. I could have failed to learn any language. I could have gotten sick. I could have been robbed. Stranded in Italy and forced to huddle in the shade of a marble cathedral surviving only on focaccia sandwiches and Brunello di Montalcino wine.

IMG_3413

“Can you spare some prosciutto?”

So after 10 months of traveling, here’s what I’m most thankful for. Friends, art, and of course, languages.

Continue Reading →

Unexpected Wonder

Posted on by

I came to Torino because I was bored of Milano. I fell in love with the place.

IMG_5663

Torino (Turin) sits 80 miles to the west of Milano, in the hills of the Piedmont region. Like all respectable cities, it’s located on a river. This one is the river Po. Every time I see the name I think of Kung Fu Panda.

IMG_5660

In addition to the river, Torino has beautiful architecture. It also has amazing food, and of course great cappuccinos. A local said Torino has everything you could want, except the ocean.

Continue Reading →

Oktoberfest!

Posted on by
IMG_5509

Need I say more…?

I went to Oktoberfest! The real one in Munich!

I cannot describe how amazing it was to actually get a table on the first day! The energy was crazy. Waiters are carrying 12 liters of beer down the aisles. There’s a brass band in the middle of the tent, and people are all standing on the benches in lederhosen and dirndls.

IMG_5523

Biggest darn tent I’ve ever seen…

I was there with two friends who had never been either, so it was great to see their reactions. We found a table full of Swiss men in their twenties. With lederhosen, of course.

Continue Reading →

Debrief of the Italy Mission

Posted on by

IMG_5094

That title sounds so spy-like. Debrief of the Italy Mission. I bet debriefings are incredibly boring – listening to someone drone on about all the mundane details of hours stuck in the surveillance van with bad takeout food and…wait, do my blog posts sound like that?

Here are the results of three months in Italy in a surveillance van

  1. I can impress a taxi driver
  2. I wish I’d started school earlier
  3. I slacked off
  4. I earned an art history degree

Impressing a taxi driver

IMG_3833

I chalk up taxi fares to the “language practice” budget.

Everyone knows that the best judge of language level is a taxi driver. And I passed with flying colors. He couldn’t believe I’d only been studying for two months. We talked about my year of travel, the Italian economy, and how to learn a language. I sounded confident, my accent was good, and most of the words came naturally.

Continue Reading →

The Interwebs Sent Me Around the World

Posted on by
IMG_3873

“Rome, if you want to…”

What makes a guy decide to travel the world for a year to learn three languages? Doesn’t everyone know that you can’t learn even a single language in a year?! Three is impossible! And you’ll be completely alone because you can’t make friends until you’re fluent. And your career! You’ll get passed over for promotions and probably never recover all that earning potential. It’s madness, I tell you! Madness!

Maybe all of my friends thought that way. At least they were kind enough to substitute something ambiguous like “it will be the trip of a lifetime” (which could be good or bad). When they said I had to do it while I could, I don’t know if they meant it was actually a good idea, or just something they knew I had to get out of my system.

Today I’m going to give credit (or blame) to some writers on the interwebs who inspired and educated me for this trip:

How weird is it that I’ve never met any of them? Or maybe it’s weird that I actually emailed with a couple of them. (I even wrote a guest post for one of them a long time ago.)

Continue Reading →

Back to School

Posted on by
IMG_3903

I thought long and hard about going back to school…

Monday I’m going back to school. Have pity on my teachers. I’m going to be quite the troublemaker.

Here’s what I want from the school

  1. Structure
  2. Friends
  3. Conversation – not grammar

Structure

Guess who doesn’t work very hard without a schedule? Yeah, that would be me.

Continue Reading →

An Italian in Paris

Posted on by
IMG_4793

This blog post commemorates the Brill/Chance invasion of Paris in 2015…

I love visiting Paris. The three best parts are seeing the Eiffel Tower, speaking French, and looking at Monet’s paintings. I also really like the waiters. Ok, that’s four things. Cramming in Italian must be making me lose other skills. I mean, our brains have to get full at some point, right? Like when you can’t add any more songs to your iPhone?

IMG_4774

So tall you can’t take a picture of the whole thing. (If you see one, it was photoshopped.)

 

It’s a joy to see the Eiffel tower. Not just up close. Everywhere you turn it pops up between buildings. (“Look, there’s the Eiffel Tower!”) The poor thing was supposed to be torn down after the world’s fair of 1890-something or other. Look, Italian has squeezed out my room for remembering dates.

Continue Reading →