last night i had the privlidge of meeting maurizio, one of the famous italian gigi rosso brothers. what a charming intelligent man! sitting down for dinner with my parents i am always impressed at how well educated wine makers are. you'd think that they would only know about wine, but instead they are well informed on ancient greek history, linguistics, environmental politics, and a wide range of other topics. they are also increasingly multi-lingual, but i suspect that might be a european thing. this guy speaks english, italian, spanish, french and a bit of romanian. he learned romanian because he hired a woman to look after his mother, who is terminally ill. this is supposedly a new trend in italian society in which the women aren't around to take care of the elderly as they are all working. there has been a massive influx of single eastern european women to fill this gap. his mothers nurse spoke no italian whatsoever, and as such he began to slowly learn romanian.



personally i think that it makes perfect sense. as a country's population demographics shift, so should the spoken languages. in toronto we have a huge portuguese community, as well as ethiopian, chinese, indian, italian, polish, etc. while i can't learn all of those languages, i think it is important that i start to make solid steps to learn at least the polite words of the languages that i come in contact with frequently. be patient, my learning curve is slow. last week i learned how to say thank you in chinese, although i'm sure it differs according to dialect.

shie shieeeee!

today i had a talk with my parent's cleaning lady while i was eating breakfast. she has been working for them for years, at first once every two weeks, and now that we can afford it she comes once a week. she speaks very little english, but she is always so kind and sweet with my sister and i as she has seen us grow up over the years. i asked her first if she knew any spanish, but she didn't. portuguese is so similar though. she taught me some numbers, parts of the body and greetings. many things were the same or similar: boca, nariz, dedos, buen dia, como estas, etc. other things were totally different and i couldn't pronounce them for my life! she seemed so happy that i asked her about her language and home country. she even invited me over to her house on the weekend, and told me where i could take portuguese lessons in the city. very sweet lady!