“I’ll just speak Spanish,” D. said before we left. “It worked in Germany, right? Remember – we went to that Italian restaurant, and the wait staff were OK with it?”
In this particular region of Italy … it didn’t work. Not only didn’t they understand Spanish, but D. was a bit too shy to actually speak it, after the first few odd looks. It’s a shame, really, because it meant D. would end up speaking an odd, broken English / Spanish. For instance, in trying to get the restaurant staff to actually cook a pizza, D. resorted to, “Cocinado. Burned. Toast. Tostado. Cocinarle para doce minutos?” Eventually he got the message across (probably with “tostado”), but he was frustrated much of the time, linguistically.
Part of the language difficulty was because the people in the Dolomite region speak German, Italian, and their own local language, Ladin. So, the ear … well, gets lost between words which alternate between sounding like “gratzi,” “gratzi-e,” “gratzi-a,” and “gratzi-le.” We just couldn’t understand which was “correct” – so were a bit lost. The phrasebook was quite helpful, of course, but we probably ought to have brought a German phrasebook, as well as an Italian phrasebook.
In other news, Tanita’s book Mare’s War launches today! For a chance to win a free copy (or some other goodies), visit her at TanitaSDavis.com/blog.
– D & T
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beautiful church
Don't feel bad. Even the Germans can't always understand or communicate with the "German" speaking alpine folk. You had more vocab than we did. Bravo, brave souls! So glad you were able to enjoy the beautiful Dolomites. I love that area!
Adrian always tries speaking Spanish when we're abroad. It doesn't usually get us too far, but amazingly it worked in Troisvierges, a small town in Luxembourg. Go figure.