Sitting alone in a restaurant in Rome can be a very awkward thing.
I'm writing now in my notebook as the servers stare, and every other person at a table speaks with their party. I have been oddly placed directly in the middle of the walkway into the garden dining room, so there's no avoiding sticking out: tall blonde american alone = obvious freak show.
I ended up here, wherever here is, by chance; I had a list of six restaurants I wanted to try before leaving, and not one of them was open. So here I am, in a random little restaurant in the middle of nowhere. But as those tend to be the most interesting places, I'm actually not at all concerned.
I'm sitting at a table adjacent to a group of six older Swedish gentlemen and ladies.
[and how do I know this about them? when the server took their plates: "He say, 'you finish?', No, we Swedish". har har har har]
It turns out they're all neighbors in a small city in Southern Sweden, and they travel various places together. That sounds so lovely. This year is Roma, Madagascar, and Tunisia; next year will be California and Vegas.
We have had a very interesting conversation over the past couple of hours, a few plates of spaghetti pomodoro, and several glasses of vino tinto. Rather than describe everything about these guys, let me just state the particular things I learned from them:
- Northern Sweden is very desolate. Never visit there.
- Europeans are still very grateful for the American sacrifices in WWII, for "the sacrifice of young men, or else we would all be German or Italian".... so they don't harbor any hatred toward Americans, regardless of politics, for that reason alone.
- There is always a war going on somewhere. Someone's fighting. Just right now America's involved and it's close to home [for you]. [You] are involved but that doesn't mean anything. Thus there's no reason for bad feelings.
- There is no reason to hate anyone. At all.
Not bad for two hours of discussion. And what life lessons I received in return for a little time and a map of Rome, directions, and a pen!
I again wonder at the fact that we are communicating in English. This city is such a strange collection of people from so many places, and yet, everyone knows some little bit of english, no matter where they hail from. So in this city in Italy, in the middle of Europe, with tourists out the wazoo, here we are, all trying to speak slightly different versions of English to understand each other.
I've known that was the case, but it never really hit home til today, when I was in the garden Quirinale. An old Italian man sat down next to me on a bench. I was sketching the statue in the middle of the garden, of a famous dude on a horse, with the late afternoon sun coming across. When I finished, he asked in broken English if I was an art student, and then whether I was English or American. I decided to go out on a limb because I didn't understand him well, and, as opposed to what I did all week, pretend I was German.
We proceeded to have a broken conversation in English, in which I almost copied his accent, thinking which words would be basic and building blocks for an ESL-speaker, which would allow us to communicate without one of us having "superior" grammar- that is always my least favorite part of speaking with a nonnative speaker, when one of the two has an upper hand by the mere fact that they spoke the language well. It's a strange power struggle, and seldomly does the nonnative speaker come out on top. But when neither knows it well, there is no such struggle, and all that is important is understanding and using body language (the most beautiful and expressive form of communication, in my opinion). I feel rather bad about pretending to be something I wasn't in my discussion with this guy, but to be fair, he was rather creepy in the way he approached me and decided to sit very close on the bench with me. It was half self-defense to avoid sharing too much information. But that's just an excuse. I was scared, a bit, and it also sounded interesting to try.
Net in net: try it. Put yourself in someone else's shoes sometimes. It's amazing what you'll learn. Especially if you have nothing to lose, and you can pretend without it hurting anyone.
No comments:
Post a Comment