The pursuit of language proficiency and unfamiliar cultures, not necessarily in that order, sometimes leads you down unexpected paths.
I once worked in the city of Palermo, Sicily. My boss was a sympathetic person with a scholarly bent. Now and again, he gave me a day or two off work so that I could see a little more of Sicily beyond Palermo. On the east coast of the island is the city of Catania, founded by the Greeks in the 8th century BC. One beautiful morning, together with a fellow exchange student who was from Germany, I crossed the island by train. There was much to see. The volcano of Etna could be spotted to the north. At its foot was the ancient town of Taormina with its old Roman amphitheatre. On the bus back to Catania where we had checked in at a youth hostel, we noticed that the air to the south was getting hazy and deep red. As evening came, we went to the port area with a group of youths from the hostel for a meal of fish, calamari, pasta and white wine.
The haze we had observed from the bus descended on us between the wine and the food. It was no haze, however. It was sand blowing slowly in from the Sahara Desert. The phenomenon is known as the Scirocco in Italian. With it comes a steep rise in temperature. While we ate and drank it rose from about 30 degrees Celsius to 45. We were dripping with sweat. Dew formed on our chilled wine glasses and the Formica tabletop became sticky with a layer of sand. The waiter recommended that we sip the wine slowly and leave the last drops in the glass. He smiled and said, “Wait and see”.
What we saw was a thin sediment on the bottom of our glasses. It was sand. The waiter said, “Bits of Africa have come here. Taste it.” But the taste was that of white wine. No African flavour. The wine was good with or without African sand in it, so we ordered more while we practiced the new word “scirocco” with much laughter and merriment.
There is a point in this beyond the anecdote of a tourist. The absence of the opportunity to speak your mother tongue seems to enhance the sense of sound perception – and thereby also the perception of cultural nuances. I spoke German with my travelmate as we moved around, but also Italian, after a fashion. At the seaside “scirocco table” more languages were used. English was not so predominant back then as it is now. My German friend knew some, but not much. There were people from the former Yugoslavia who were unfamiliar with English. We therefore all threw tentative words in several languages across the table and managed to forge a very stimulating conversation. The sanded white wine may have been a help.
A la prossima volta!
Karl
The Hofsö Method 