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When You're REALLY Grateful You've Studied the Language
A few years ago, I studied abroad in Florence, Italy. At the end of the semester, my parents came to visit and I traveled by train with them down to Naples. The original plan was to pick up a rental car in Naples and then drive directly to the town of Ravello on the Amalfi Coast, a spectacularly beautiful coastline in southern Italy. We had purposefully picked up the car in the early afternoon, since the drive along the Amalfi Coast is incredibly winding and narrow, and almost never goes in a straight line. Also, the road is bounded on one side by a rocky cliff, and on the other side by a straight drop down to the Mediterranean. In other words, it's most definitely not a road you'd want to navigate in the dark. Well, we were about thirty minutes outside of Naples when the needle on the car's temperature gauge started moving ominously closer and closer to red. We were a little nervous, of course, but when smoke started coming out of the hood of the car, then we became pretty concerned. At that point, the car basically stopped running, so we pulled over as best we could, and called the rental car company about coming to pick us up, since they had clearly given us a bad car. However, they told us that they didn't have another car for us in Naples, it was too late in the day to come pick us up (it was about 2:00 p.m.), and that our ONLY option was to drive to their office in the "nearby" town of Sorrento since that office had an available car. Of course, we didn't think we would make it that far, Sorrento being at least a half hour drive from where we were currently stopped. Fortunately, we were really lucky. After my dad stopped screaming at the rental car company and hung up, and soon after we started to think that we would need to push the car all the way to Sorrento, we looked around the corner of the road and saw that there was, unbelievably enough, a tiny service station on the side of the road. Now, I had just started studying Italian about five months before, when I began my semester in Florence. I felt I had a pretty firm grasp of beginner-level Italian, but I certainly didn't know how to explain mechanical problems in the language. And my parents didn't speak Italian at all. However, with the aid of a tiny pocketbook dictionary, and my knowledge of very basic Italian, I somehow managed, in desperate terms, to explain the situation to the employees at the service station. Despite my broken Italian, they seemed to understand what had happened, and that we needed to get the car to Sorrento in whatever way possible, so they helped us push the car to the service station. Once there, they told us that they could probably patch up the car just enough for us to get to Sorrento. After they finished doing what they could, they gave me instructions about what to do, and not to do, in order to get the car all the way to Sorrento. And I understood them! (As far as I know.) What's more, they didn't even charge us. (Although we paid them anyway.) As a result, despite the considerable language barrier and the fact that we ended up having to drive in a barely functional car for half an hour in what was quickly becoming rush hour traffic, we actually made it to Sorrento. Thank goodness, the new car we got there was fine, and managed to get us all the way to our hotel in Ravello—even though we ended up having to navigate the Amalfi Coast in the dark after all. I have to say that it was a pretty proud moment for me, in spite of the bad circumstances. If I hadn't paid as much attention in Italian class, and hadn't decided to carry an Italian-English dictionary with me on the trip, we might have ended up stranded between Naples and Ravello, or stuck with a huge repair or tow truck bill. Just goes to show that it's always good to come prepared when you visit a country that speaks a foreign language. You don't have to speak the language fluently, but just studying up beforehand can really save you if anything goes wrong. —Lynn (Ohio) Tags: Amalfi Coast, Italian, Italy, newsletter
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