If you’re learning Italian, or any foreign language, you’ll no doubt be familiar with the experience of confusing two words that, at least to you, look or sound similar.
For example, when I’m speaking Italian I tend to confuse the word scorciatoia (short cut) with the word scoiattolo (the tree-dwelling rodent).
Why am I telling you this now?
Because Dallas, Texas has lots of squirrels.
You see them everywhere!
Sitting in a park? There’s a squirrel, eating a nut and looking quite unafraid.
Looking out your bedroom window? There’s another, running through the upper branches of that tree!
So that’s Dallas.
The Sixth Floor Museum was very good, well worth a visit if you’re in the area.
And after all that history, we felt like some lunch.
Downtown Dallas is composed of enormous office blocks, just like in ‘Dallas’.
There must be tens of thousands of people working here each day, lawyers, bankers and so on.
But the streets of the center are eerily quiet, at least compared to an Italian city.
There are no shops, but also seemed to be no bars, restaurants, few fast foods, not even a kebap shop.
So where, oh where, do all those office workers eat lunch?
It was a complete mystery.
The squirrels have their nuts, but for people… niente!
In the end we had microwaved pizza and coke in the Greyhound bus station.
It was just like you’d imagine, very much the underside of what is obviously a very prosperous city.
But anyway, as you’d expect, the bus station is VERY CENTRAL.
In fact it’s JUST ALONG FROM the next museum we were to visit.
More of less OPPOSITE the…
Yes, you guessed it!
Today’s free Italian listening is on Gli indicatori spaziali (talking about where things are…)
It’s useful, so do give it a try.
And now I’ll get out of bed and get ready to hit the interstate.
We’re off to the state capital, Austin!
A lunedì.
