Pass the Cheese Please!

Italian Words: piovere (to rain), ombrello (umbrella), Dove siamo? (Where are we?)

Have you ever felt like you made the right decision, but you were being carried the wrong direction?  Welcome to the Italian bus system.

This morning we walked to the train station, which also acts as a bus hub.  Almost all bus lines stop there.  There are two places that a bus can stop.  They can stop right in front of the station, or just around the corner, near the temporary train station (the main station is being renovated).  We needed to catch a #6 bus to the vet campus, and we knew that only the #6 at quarter of and quarter past the hour would actually go on its extended route to the vet school.  So we saw the bus pull up at 9:15, and we climbed aboard.

One hour later we were wondering where the stop for the vet school was.  We seemed to be way out in the countryside, outside of Parma.  Then the bus stopped for about 10 minutes at the end of its route way out there, and then returned to the train station.  Huh.  Must be a different #6.

As it turns out, when the bus returns to the station the second time, it pulls up to the second bus stop, the one that is around the corner by the temporary train station.  From there, it does the extended route to the vet school.  So we got on the next #6 we saw at the other stop, and 10 minutes later we were at the vet school, after roughly an hour and a half of travel.  It was a good thing that we are only doing informal Italian lessons this week with Federico, otherwise we may have made a very bad impression.  We called Federico and he understood our situation, and there were no problems.

We began our linguistic adventures by translating our own biographies that are on the blog.  Apparently Federico is an avid reader.  He printed off the entire blog and little by little we are working on translating it.  Later this week we will get into some agricultural words.

più tardi