TODAY I WENT TO THE SMALL GROCERY STORE in Cagli to buy something to eat for lunch. I had bread in my apartment but no meat or even peanut butter to make a sandwich with. I looked around the store for sliced meat, but I didn’t see any prepackaged and didn’t know how to order it from the deli. Instead, I looked for peanut butter and couldn’t find any. As I was checking out, I tried to ask the cashier where the peanut butter was. Neither of us could understand each other so he directed me to another cashier who seemed confident that she knew what I was looking for. She walked me down an aisle in the store and proudly held out a roll of what appeared to be aluminum foil. I had no idea how what I said translated to that, so I thanked her and said to forget about it. The store employees must have felt bad for me, however, because everyone started to help me look for peanut butter. One man walked me over to a shelf full of Nutella and held it up for me. I got the bright idea to say that it was similar to Nutella and it is spread on bread. Instead of using the correct Italian word for bread, “pane”, I said "panna", which actually means cream. The man then walked me over to the refrigerated section and handed me pudding with whipped cream on top. At this point, everyone in the small store had turned to watch the spectacle, so I just grabbed a can of Nutella and pretended that that was what I had wanted all along. It was only as I was walking out of the store that I remembered that they don’t have peanut butter in Cagli.
       During my time in Cagli, my lack of language skills has been a great impediment to my daily activities. Even an experience such as this, a trip to the grocery store became difficult for me because I did not know the correct word to express what I wanted to say, and because I forgot about certain cultural differences between the U.S. and Cagli (in this case, different foods).

--Melissa Schantz
(Loyola)