As we’re headed home tomorrow morning, a couple of things that I never got around to that made me laugh a little:
Naples (and Rome) still has lots of public telephones on the streets, which was kind of neat. At one, a group of Gen Z kids were taking turns posing with it, pretending to make phone calls. It made me
and
at the same time.
Our all-day tour guide in Rome was excellent. He liked talking about languages, which is something I like (well, playing with words, anyway), and he was making us laugh.
He spoke wonderfully-accented English, very languidly, softly. He said there were three English-speaking places that still gave him trouble:
“Scotland, Ireland…I have trouble with the way they, uh,
push their words together. They push them, like three words into one. I can get maybe 75% of what they say, but that’s about it.
“The worst, though…the Australians! I can’t even get 40%. Maybe 30%. They’re…I don’t know what they’re doing. It is a mystery what they say, but they’re nice, they apologize to me, and I tell them, ‘No, it’s your language, don’t apologize, I should apologize!’ But seriously, I had an Australian couple in my car a month ago, maybe, and for 11 hours. 11hours. My brain was sick after that, like I had a brain sweat from listening so hard. I had to take three days off from driving.”
Then we talked a little about other languages, and my favorite, given my honest love of it, was his succinct assessment of the German language (which I truly do love to hear spoken):
“German. The words try to kill you.”