Nikkilooch

Yesterday Italy celebrated 150 years of unification.  It was declared a holiday this year.  Everyone had flags out and local festivities.

Rugby is by far my favorite sport to watch.  Mostly because of those short shorts they wear and how manly they are.

I don’t know about any of you other lady readers out there but I like a manly man.  The manlier the better.  Shew, give me a moment whilst I fan myself.

If you remember I went to see Italy vs Argentina in Verona a few weeks ago.  Last weekend we went to Modena (home of balsamic vinegar) to see team Italy vs Fiji.  It was a pretty amazing match.  Fiji does a haka dance before each match similar to the All Blacks.

We made a weekend of the match and stayed the night in Modena.  We were lucky enough to be staying in the actual same hotel as team Italy.  This monstrous fellow is Sergio Parisse, il capitano.  He makes me and my husband look like smurfs.

This is the BARBARIAN.  Castrogiovanni.  That’s a serious last name for a serious player.  This guy was in a scrum one time and broke another person’s collar bone.  He BREAKS BONES.  He was also really nice about posing for a picture with us.

According to the American calendar (and maybe the Italian one for all I know) today is officially the first day of fall.  Even though the mornings are starting to become crispy cool, it was 80F on my way to work at noon.

I wore sandals.

Come on, Fall.  I need more legitimate crispiness for new boot buying.

I don’t, however, need another great reason for art journaling.  I’m taking Janel’s I heart fall art journal class and loving it.  So far though I’ve only been able to play catch up on the weekends.  So hopefully I’ll be playing catch up again this weekend and photograph my pages to be able to post them next week.

Name that movie!

Lugano, Switzerland.

Even though I was there, taking these pictures, I still couldn’t believe this place.

It’s unfair that one small town can contain so much beauty, when other places could benefit from a fraction of what Lugano has.

Cecilia and I are in this one as proof that this isn’t a digitally altered post card.

The nice thing about this corner of Switzerland is that they primarily speak Italian. I’ve found another place in the world where I can use my hard earned Italian. It’s actually easier here for me to speak and understand because the Swiss speak Italian without a “dialecto” that’s as strong as anywhere else in Italy.

Did you know that about Italy?

In the States when we say people speak in dialect, it’s English with a certain region’s accent. We can still understand each other and basically speak the same language. In Italy, the children learn the dialect at home (where I live it’s the Veneto dialect) and don’t learn proper Italian until they go to school. Each dialect from each region in Italy is so different that someone from Sicily can’t understand someone from Venice unless they switch to proper Italian. The proper Italian is what they taught me in my classes. So Italians all over Italy can understand me when I speak to them, but I have no idea what they are saying to me most of the time because they answer in the dialect. When the Lugano people answered me, I understood.

*cue angel chorus*

I only got to visit for an afternoon, so I don’t have many stories, but Lugano kept a little piece of my heart. How could it not? I bet it already has a little piece of your heart now too.