vacanza

Sophomore year is finally over. Now I'll probably have a lot more time to learn some Italian. I went through a few of the sections in the Ultimate Italian book and it doesn't seem to be hard. The only problem is that it's kind of easy to mix it up with Spanish...
But I just love how the book has some Note Culturali hehe. One of them is about greetings, and how they are more involved in Italy than in the US, and it explains that it is quite common for people to kiss each other on both cheeks as they meet. I couldn't help picturing Don Corleone (although I think he had Fabio Carrera's face instead) kissing everyone in his mafia family :D

I just love stereotypes hh. That's why I changed my profile picture to something more suitable. A few years ago, there was a very famous soap opera in Brasil called Terra Nostra, which told about the lives of Italian immigrants that came to Brasil looking for lands to grow coffee, and they all wore berets like the one I got. So I'm definitely more prepared to go to Venice and blend in.
Now I just need a Giuliana as pretty as Mateo's (from the picture) and I'm all set.

Calcio e Coppa del Mondo

I just came back from a soccer match and I kind of realized that it may be important, when going to Venice, to know a little about football italiano.
Well, first of all, let's pay tribute to one of the greatest Italian soccer players of all times: Roberto Baggio! Without his great efforts (he missed the final penalty kick), Brasil would have never won the 1994 World Cup, and we would probably not be the nation with the most World Cup titles: five.
By the way, Italy is the second on the list, with four world championships: 1934 and 1938 (which shouldn't count, because not even my grandparents remember these), 1982 and 2006, which make them tetracampioni del mondo.
Italy also hosted the 1990 World Cup, won by Germany, which is one of the first memories of my early life. I clearly remember their mascot, named Ciao, juggling the ball, which happened to be his head too, which I personally see as a metaphor of the italian stereotypical temperament: always losing their heads.

inizio

Hi there.
So this is my blog, which I decided to call 'mangia che te fa bene' because this is one of the only full sentences I can think of in Italian, and I think it works great with the famous hand-movement, essential to any Italian speaker.
I learned this sentence from an old McDonald's commercial, back when I lived in Brasil, when they were advertising a new desert called Caldo & Freddo, which consisted of cold Vanilla Ice-cream with a hot strawberry topping, which was amazingly good, by the way. But for some reason they stopped making it, and I never saw it again. But I never forgot the commercial, nor its deliciousness.
ciao