November 2nd, 2008
In Soviet Russia, beard grows you!
So my precious Targus Stowaway appears to be on its last keys, so to speak, and I am relegated to typing one handed, wwith the occasional key studder. I am on an Airbus packed with Russians and dicey ticketing has me required to check-in again at Sheremetyevo before catching my flight to Narita. I can only hope we don’t have any of that circling/deplane on tarmac nonsense again at Moscow, I’ll probably end being seated smack dab in the middle of the plane as it is
So, my first trip to Europe in two years is ending, and as usual very few of my anticipated celebrity meetings did not take place. There were no Von Trapp family singers in Austria, nor sweet long kisses goodbye in the Austrian way by girls named Elsa. I did meet a nice lady named Caroline and her daughter on the train to Venice.
I’m still not sure if people assume I’m European, I think that nearly everyone just wants to assume that I speak whatever language they speak natively. In Venice I spoke Italian to Italian merchants, French to French tourists, German to Austrian tourists, and Russian to Russian flight attendants.
When checking in for my flight to Moscow, a tall, attractive Alitalia clerk looked at my passport and remarked mock disapprovingly, “A name like Ventura and you only speak English?” I felt the blood rush to my face and managed a half tongue-in-cheek retort that I did in fact speak a little Italian. If I was James Bond the response would have been in Italian and suggest that she could perhaps help me work on native tongue.
Actually, most of my success seemed to come with French elementary school girls. In addition to my hangman partners yesterday morning, today I got into a face-making match on the vaporetto with another little French girl, and later told her mother which station the airport bus was at and how to find it.
