Again with the trains

I had a fairly satisfying experience on the train today.

So I was riding the regionale after dark by myself, which made it necessary to search out a position near the least sketchy looking person or group of people possible. I found a business looking type guy wearing a really unfortunate sweater and chattering self-importantly on the phone and figured he would do. I sat down with my little bag of chips (I rarely eat chips, but for some reason I felt like chips). (Additional parenthetical comment: if any Brits should happen to wander over here, by chips I mean crisps. See, with all the teaching of the english, I am now aware of issues like this one.)

"What flavor are those?" he paused his phone conversation to ask.

"Um... nothing. I don't know. Salt," I responded eloquently. He went back to his phone conversation. I frowned at my chips (crisps) and wondered whether he wanted me to offer him one. Meanwhile, the moment in which that would have been appropriate passed.

Also meanwhile, he continued to chatter away in that I'm-so-popular-I-can't-pause-my-social-life-to-take-the-train kind of way and I was feeling left out, so I called my grandmother. (Oh, the social life. How it scintillates!) This turned out to have been a strategically valid move, though, because this is the French grandmother so I got to exhibit my language skillz.

"So, where are you from?" he asked when I hung up. This was satisfying in and of itself because he was prompted to ask it after he heard me speaking another language rather than immediately after my first syllable in Italian. A significant improvement on other conversations I've had.

"America."

To his credit, he didn't bat an eye.

"Che bello. And are you studying here?"

"Teaching English."

"Che bello! Quite the polyglot, aren't you?"

What, did you miss it? That was the satisfying part. (Yeah, no, it doesn't take much. I'm aware, but thanks for pointing it out.) It occurred to me, though: perhaps this is how people meet other people while on public transportation. You know, like in movies where people meet the really hot guy on the plane and then they have some drama and eventually get married and have babies? Yeah. It's a pity his sweater was so unfortunate. I mean, compared to the native Reggiani, I'm fairly non-judgemental about clothes, but it was argyle and in various shades of orange, brown and puke. Still, though, I can't deny that I was vainly pleased when he called out a casual "ciao!" as he rode past me on his bike. (This is after we got off of the train, by the way. In case you were trying to picture that in your head and it wasn't quite working out.)