For Alessandra

My Roman friend, Alessandra Gotti, gave me a wonderful book entitled 101 Cose da Fare a Roma Almeno una Volta nella Vita or 101 Things to Do in Rome at Least Once in Your Life. It is a lovely memento of both my friendship with Alessandra and my love affair with the city of Roma. Of course, there is a very practical side to this book, too. It helps me with my Italian. The book is broken down into 101 short chapters, each of which contains either a topic or a site. For example, the first chapter is called Bere al Nasone. Now nasone translates into big nose or hooter but in the context refers to drinking from a spigot. With the strain of Puritanism in American sensibilities, drinking from a spigot says one thing but drinking from a big-nosed hooter of a spigot says so much more.

I've read six chapters of my Italian book so far. I read a chapter once through to get the gist of it because my Italian isn't very good. Then I re-read it and painstakingly look up the words that I don't know. Finally, I re-re-read it. Sometimes I even read it outloud to myself but I inevitably get tongue-tied and my comprehension dips exceptionally low. Of the six chapters, I have been fortunate to have visited all but one of the places.

Arguably, it's difficult to try to learn a foreign language in your 50s but I plug along. Alessandra, likewise, has little opportunity to practice the English she knows. Therefore, I'm embarking on a new blog endeavor to try to find 101 things about Fayetteville and Northwest Arkansas to write about. This will provide Alessandra with some English reading material and for those of you who used to live here with an opportunity walk down Memory Lane. In the process, I might even learn something about my environment. My 101 entries will be numbered so that I (and you) can distinguish them from other random blogs that strike my fancy but that don't have any relevance to things one ought to do around here.