Sondaggio

Well, I'm going to end my poll of where you guys are all from.
Here are the results:

Germany wins with 65 %
Switzerland is second with 17 %
Italy is third with 8 %
USA is fourth with 5 %
and other is 2 %

Next I want to find out which languages you speak! :)
Enjoy!

Quaranta

Ok, here's something that's really scary. Lately I went to Zurigo and there were two girls who looked kind of lost at the stamp vending machine. They spoke English and for those who don't know it I used to travel to the US every summer for quite some years and in the end I felt absolutely no difference between expressing myself in English or German, in fact people used to believe that I was from another part of the US and didn't even realize that what little had remained of my accent was foreign. I used to be so proud of having learned English so well after my teachers at school had told me I had absolutely no talent for learning languages. (In fact I had to repeat 7th grade because of-- tadaaahhh, English and Latin--how ironic is that???)...

However, so there I was with those two kind of lost-looking girls whose every word I understood and I asked them "Can I help you?" Oh, they were sooo relieved and grateful because all the explanation on the vending machine was in German, French and Italian but then I wanted to explain to them how it works. So I stood there and I wanted to tell them that shipping a letter to South Africa was 1,40 CHF. But, ohhhhhhhh!!! I got so far as to tell them it was "one". Of course I had no clue what CHF is in English and that really didn't bother me, I simply said "franchi" like they say in Italian. But then I wanted to say 40. And, can you believe it? A enormously HUUUUUUUUUUGE "QUARANTA" was written all over my brain. I think I blushed. Desperately, in my head I began to count "ten, twenty, thirty..." but then there was the

QUARANTA

again. I swear, I was completely, utterly, helplessly unable to say "forty". I didn't not only remember "forty", it even felt as if "forty" had never been saved on my hard drive. I wanted to die of shame right there... Then, it got even worse, I wanted to explain why I was having problems speaking English when I first sounded like a native speaker and I could not for the life of me remember the word "learning". Ohhhhhhhhhhhhh, aiutooooo! What is happening to me? Also, whenever I talk to someone on the phone, no matter if it is in English or German, I cannot refrain from saying "si" instead of "yes" or "ja". Is it possible to lose a language? But then how strange is it that I can still write in English but speaking don't work? And how am I going to teach English when I am apparently losing it? Hellllllll---p!!!!

Unusual friendship

I always start to ponder things when I'm tired. Last night there was a full moon and I hardly slept at all. That is unusual in itself as I have been sleeping pretty darn well here ever since I threw away that piumone horribile. I also had to get up at a number that started with six, ohhh!! My thoughts today were about friendship. What a strange thing that is. Three months ago I talked to someone on the internet mostly in German... three months later I feel so at ease with this friend and he has taught me his language and shown me the most beautiful places of the Ticino. And sometimes I think how weird that is.

There are so many things that speak against us being friends. For once, supposedly friendship between men and women don't exist. We also speak different languages (at least we did in the beginning as we never speak German together) and are from different cultures. And lastly, he's five years older than me. But then with true friendship all these things become so unimportant.

Which makes me wonder what is that thing that we call "friendship"? If it's not in the words, not in the things you have in common (culture), if it's not in the communication (language)... where do we find it? Is it a in-between-thing or is it above all of these things? How have we managed to do this? Did we build all this on meta-communication? I once read that only 5% of what we communicate is actually communicated using words, which would explain how we managed when I hardly spoke a word of Italian. (Which still doesn't explain how he tolerated my abuse of the language... :)

But meta-communication is tightly bound to culture. And that leaves another gap between us... how did we build this bridge? With what? I have written my Master thesis about culture and the concepts of Edward T. Hall and Geert Hofstede. That was inspired by my experiences in the US. All in all I have lived about two to three years in the US. I must say having read almost everything about culture and how they differ and how you define them, I still feel unable to grasp what it is. There are some variables and knowing them helps a ton if one moves to a foreign country... but my favorite metaphor is that it is a slippery piece of soap. If you grasp it to tight, it slips away. But that's also the magic of it. And maybe the same thing is also true for friendship...