That time with the sheets

While we're on the topic of grammar and other types of information with very little practical use...

"Sheets?" says my boss upon overhearing my conversation with another teacher. We've been in Italy for a week or two and have now moved out of the temporary apartment (into Creepy Guy Apartment, in my case) and are discussing our lack of basic housewares. I have been sleeping on a (starchy) mattress protector and under a (thin) towel. The mattress cover is itchy and the towel is not a very good blanket.

"You can buy those at Zara Home," she continues. "At Petali. It's just up the road a bit, like five minutes by car."

Which conveniently overlooks the fact that neither of us possesses a car and she has already informed us that taking the school cars out for fun is verboten.

We trudge to Petali on the side of the road. The sun is kind of hot. Italian men seem to feel that it's okay to beep their horns at us as they go by. (We elect to feel amused rather than degraded.)

We enter Zara Home and laugh. Our boss is a hilarious woman. She sends us on a "five minute drive" on foot to a place where they sell things that we cannot really afford on the puny salary she pays us. We do not have a Zara Home type salary. It's more of a Wal-mart salary. Ikea on a good day. We trudge back.

"Maybe at Meridiana," recommends someone else, helpfully pointing out where that is on a map. Did you know they have a large-ish road named for JFK just outside of Reggio? And on it, there is the Meridiana shopping center, in which there is a large-ish supermarket which contains sheets in a number of basic colors.

The next day I trudge out to there on foot, as I don't yet understand the bus system. It is not a particularly pleasant walk, but whatever. Also it is kind of long. But whatever. There are sheets.

"Lenzuole!" I read proudly to myself, very pleased that I have managed to remember what this means. (Also the picture on the front is a good clue.) Having been in Italy for a week, I have decided to strike out on my own, minus my little dictionary, so any vocabulary I use will have to come from my own head. The dictionary was Italian-French, anyway, which lead to mild confusion at times. Still, though, it was reassuring.

I assiduously read several different packages of sheets. Some say "1 piazza" and some say "2 piazze". I am stumped. I translate the labels into French (leftover habit from the dictionary, I guess) but "piazza" is tricky. Because it could either mean "place" or it could mean "piece", just because they kind of sound the same. In scenario A, this would mean that "2 piazze" means a bigger bed, for two people. If it means "piece", then "1 piazza" contains one sheet and you have to buy them separately, whereas "2 piazze" means you have both in that package. I ponder this for a while.

Probably the logical thing to do would be to go ask someone, using my dictionary-less, somewhat rusty Italian. My Italian at that point is still more suited to writing commentary on intertextuality in Dante than to actually conversing with real people in this century, though, and so I stare at the sheets some more.

Being fresh from a semester's worth of advanced hisorical romance linguistics, it occurs to me to trace the Italian words back up to their Latin roots and then down again to modern French. It would be just like an exercise from class! Or so I tell myself. In reality, I almost always screwed those exercises up because they work much better if you actually know Latin. But whatever, I think to myself.

And that is how I found myself scribbling notes about palatalization on the back of a receipt in the middle of an Iper-Sigma.

"Hai bisogno?" says a guy in an Iper-Sigma uniform at one point.

I look up from my receipt, trying very hard to remember why "piece" has a palatalized /pj/ like Italian tends to do and "place" has a regular French /pl/.

"No, no, grazie... " I mumble vaguely at him, probably kind of staring into space. (Another moment of spectacular grace and poise for me.)

Shortly thereafter, I conclude that applying medieval language development patterns to the purchase of modern day bedlinens does not work particularly well. Especially when you can't remember the patterns to begin with. I go for math instead: there are measurements in centimeters on the back. This turns out not to be a good move because I suck at math.

I start by converting to inches, which requires me to divide by 2.54, which is already far beyond my mathematical capabilities. Eventually, I remember that I do have a decent idea what a meter is, and that I therefore don't really need convert to inches. I try to picture in my head the length of the sheet and then the length of a bed, until it occurs to me that the length is not really up for debate. So I find the width measurement (which takes a while because I am retarded) and picture that instead. I picture the width of a double bed... and the width of a single bed... and already it is too many pictures. I am not a visual person. I give up.

Logic, I decide, is the answer. There is no other information on these sheets, ergo "piazza" must refer to the size, because they have to mention the size somewhere. I buy some "1 piazza" sheets in a relatively innocuous shade of blue. I trudge home under the hot September sun. They fit.

It is so pleasant to own sheets that I am able to overlook the fact that I still don't have a pillow, which kind of makes my neck stiff, which makes me think I have meningitis every morning and run, all panicked, to the dictionary, to look that up in Italian (meningite... there's one where the Latin would've worked out just fine).

It's funny the odd kinds of things you end up having trouble with when you move to another country. People are always warning you about the "culture shock" and stuff like that, but really it's other stuff that's trickier.