Picture this: 3 American girls travel from the University of Salamanca, Spain, to Milan Italy with an Italian vocabulary consisting of "grazie" and walk into a local Italian restaurant where no one speaks a word of English. This is the situation we were facing.
So, we flew to Milan for the weekend and assumed that where we'd be would be full of tourists and everyone would speak English. However, we were actually located in an area a bit outside of the city. The first night, we landed and went out looking for pizza and pasta because what else do you do during your first night in Italy?
We were walking for a while and saw an incredibly cute restaurant located in a large house with a heated porch lit by warm, pretty lights. We went in and were seated and that's when we realized this might be slightly difficult.
We passed test 1 and ordered waters and coke almost without any issue. Then, we realized we couldn't exactly read the menu. We began attempting to ask the waiter what these dishes were and he called over a second waiter to help aid the communication. The second waiter had more English knowledge--he knew the words "butter", "sorry" and "bag" so he already knew 3 times the amount of English compared to our Italian.
These Italians were the kindest people ever. In fact, the second waiter even apologized to us at one point for not speaking our language while we were in his country.
Our communication consisted of me trying to speak Spanish to them hoping that the two languages were similar enough to pass a few comprehensible words, another girl speaking English and using grand hand gestures, and the other laughing at us both.
We intended on ordering one large spaghetti for the table but communication failed and we ended up with three large spaghettis in addition to our pizza and roast beef dish. But we loved it because the food was incredible and it was incredibly cheap because we were so far from tourist locations.
At one point, we wanted to go to the bathroom but had no idea how to ask and if we started wandering around lost, we'd be berated with more Italian. So we just didn't go.
Near the end of the meal, an Italian man approached our table asking where we were from (I don't know how he knew we weren't Italian..we were acting like such locals...not). He said he was dining with his American co-worker and we talked with them briefly and the Italian man even told us to come over to his table if we needed more help which was so kind.
Asking for to-go containers was our last struggle during the meal. I tried asking for it in Spanish in multiple ways and then the other girl used her hand gestures to communicate; she literally picked up her plate and mimed walking away with it to say "to go boxes" and they finally understood.
As we were about to pay, the nice Italian man with his american friend helped us to pay by translating the cost of our meal to us. But it was the one part we could've translated ourselves because the number happened to be the same as the Spanish number.
Overall, the place was so amazing that we ended up going back (probably much to the delight of the poor waitstaff that were stuck with us the first time around). The people were incredibly kind and we all laughed together about our struggles. The food was beyond incredible and I wouldn't trade the experience for anything because that is what traveling is about--meeting and talking (or miming) with locals and getting an inside view on the life that people live in their own countries. I'd go back in a heartbeat.
