Was that English? Actually it wasn’t!

So in my life as a part time housewife, I like to take a stroll up the road to collect the mail, wave to the old fellas in the post office, buy a trashy magazine (to add to the mountain of magazines we get each week. Maybe that is another blog post, Daniel and I are being guilted into our reading habits by the shiny magazines laying in a pile on the desk, screaming ‘read me, for God’s sake read me!’). Anyways, I then visit the deli for our weekly stockpile of pork products and don’t ask me what is in the salami, actually I don’t want to know!

So, the Signora at the deli thinks that I am fluent in Italian, sadly no. Usually she sprinkles each sentence with enough English that I can understand the gist and can reply, however today without my cheat sheet (Daniel) and that liberal sprinkling of English, I was totally lost! She said something to me about it being cold and that I was in there early, I replied with a yes, its cold and I wasn’t dressed for it this morning. Phew...survived that one. Then I order some prosciutto. Nothing too interesting in that, I admit. She say’s something in Italian ...blah, blah, blah...about the prosciutto, I agree and go about my weekly review of all the products on the shelf. This usually takes a long time, because she slices those smallgoods with German precision! Then suddenly she is tallying up my smallgoods (and the other items I have peeled off the shelf) including a terribly expensive, elitist pasta; a tiny, tiny jar of olive tapenade (which I’ll have to hide from the pantry monster - aka Daniel); and some more ‘fancy visitor-only biscuits’ I decided to buy (hang on, maybe the small good German precision is not related to the pride in her work, I think it may be a ploy to get me to buy the pasta, and the tapenade and the fancy-schmancy biscuits. Ah-ha – I’m onto it now) and I am getting a $20 dollar note out of my wallet to pay and suddenly I hear those words: ‘that will be $38.65 Signora’.

What?! Huh?! Where did I accumulate $38.65? I have some ham and some prosciutto and a few groceries that she practically made me buy and suddenly I need a second mortgage to make lunches this week... She sees my eyebrows raise above my forehead in astonishment and gives me the receipt with my change (I was so bewildered I didn’t remember giving her the money) and she shows me that the prosciutto was about $100/kg. So that explains my bill and that 'blah blah blah' from the Signora when I ordered.

That had better be the best prosciutto in the world...