My first morning in Italy I was so excited. I had a brand new DSLR Camera and I felt like a Pro photographer. I got up early and went into the piazza near our hotel. There was a local market going just getting ready for their first customers. I wandered through it, taking photos here and there.
A festive fish stall
My sister found me and we wandered towards the edge and found a woman selling pashmina scarves. It was late December and I realized I had forgotten yet again to bring a scarf for the cold weather. I picked one out and asked the price. The woman didn’t speak English, so she responded in Italian. This was my first time traveling to a country where I didn’t know a single word, and it was weird. Previously I had traveled to Mexico, France, and Japan and I had known some of the language of each to get around pretty well. I realized neither of those languages would help me here.
But this time I went deer in the headlights at this new experience. I thought she said it cost 50 Euro. I was thinking, wow…that is way too much for a scarf. I kept asking, thinking I was mistaken, and she kept saying what I thought was 50 Euro. I was so sad and was complaining to my sister. My sister tired of listening to me, offered to buy me the scarf. I was shocked, she had never offered to get me something…and not something to outrageously priced.
As she paid I realized I had misheard….it wasn’t 50 Euro…it was 5 Euro. I felt like an idiot, and would have bought more scarves at that price but now was out of time. Right as we were leaving a group of Japanese tourists walked in. And she greeted and spoke to them in fluent Japanese. Great, the one time I don’t accidentally speak Japanese was the one time it could have helped in Italy.
Travel Missteps is an every-other week series on how sometimes part of the journey is making mistakes and getting lost.
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