my pizza doesn't seem to know what it wants

Trying to speak to Italians here is a game... having a whole conversation in Italian wins me points. If the other person switches to English before the end of the conversation, I lose a point. If they speak to me in English as soon as they look at me, it's minus like five points. I'm far, far into the negative now.

I've been studying, obviously, and taking classes, and I think I'm speaking at a fairly decent level, especially just for shopping or eating or everyday sorts of conversations. But I feel like I'm missing some cells in my brain that would allow me to unscramble words that are spoken to me. It's always there that I start losing points. I'm fine with the, oh, what you would you recommend, I think this looks good, or do you have my size in this, or whatever, and then they say something back, and I just have to stare at them with a dumb expression because I NEVER HAVE ANY IDEA WHAT THEY SAID. Usually I just pretend I do, which is a weird sort of stubborn streak I've discovered in myself, and that usually gets me something other than what I've ordered or asked for.

I am thinking a bit in Italian though. The other night I came home an hour or two after Yvette, and realized when I got to our fifth floor apartment door that I didn't gave the keys to get in, because I had left them in the lock of the giant door leading into the whole building, the door that faces a huge busy piazza. I ran down the stairs, I was going the speed of light by the bottom, wondering how on earth I was going to tell Maria that some stranger had her keys because I had left them in the door, and I realized suddenly that the desperate prayer I was whispering under my breath was, "Piacere, piacere, piacere, piacere..." And God apparently speaks Italian because the keys were still in the lock.

Yvette and I went to dinner on Via Veneto the other night, and the waiter sort of tolerated my stabs at Italian and spoke slowly back to me. Later he said my Italian was very "sharp" (I think he said "sharf" actually) and that I was clearly a very intelligent girl. I mean, right, obviously, but it still was nice of him to notice. After we left he followed us out to the sidewalk and wished me a Buon San Valentino and blew me a kiss. That's how well I ordered my Cesare Insalata.

I did buy boots today in Italian. I asked for my size and said some were too tight and everything. I understood nothing of what the salesperson said back to me but it was shoe shopping, so it wasn't really too difficult to guess.

The problem is that everybody in Rome seems to not only speak English but to want to show it off. (The one time I just gave up and decided to speak in English right off the bat was when I needed to buy a phone card for Brie and Heidi and I wasn't sure how to ask for it... I got my whole speech out in English and the woman looked at me and said, "Non capisco." So then I was actually pretty excited because she would have to tolerate my broken Italian, and she did, and we had a little non-fluent conversation.) Many of the menus are also in English as well, though the translations are sometimes kind of funny. We were looking at a list of pizzas the other night and one was translated as "capricious".

Last day of school tomorrow. I'll just try to cram the rest of the language in then.