Yes, my mother and I converse in two different languages. What of it?

There was an interesting phenomenon that amazes my white friends when they came to our house.  The same phenomenon existed in the homes of my Croatian, Hungarian, German and Polish friends.

Our parents spoke their language to us and we spoke English back.  We still do it.  My mother and my sons do it to some extent.

This might have grown out of convenience or necessity, but what it did do is tune my brain to be able to understand Italian and English without having to translate what's being said.  It's so natural for many of us we don't even notice.

My friends would come into the house and watch these exchanges.

My francophone friends did not have this experience.  Perhaps it was because they went to French schools that French was their first language.  When they were together they spoke French.  (side note

I am not going to die if I don't eat. Honestly.

The information that cluttered my childhood all led to me dying.

Seriously.

I wrote before of the importance of the funeral.  But the obsession with dying is funny.

They don't say "you're going to die".  They say "you gonna die".

If you don't eat, you gonna die.

If you eat too much, you gonna die.

A little bit of culture shock when they arrived.

My mother's hometown of Fossa, AQ, Italia looks like every other town in Italy.  What might seem ordinary about her town is what's beautiful about Italy.

From Piemonte to Sicilia, towns that resemble Fossa are visible outside the driver and passenger windows during a weekend drive.  They are all different.  They all have different feasts, patron saints, nicknames and their own dialect.

To help you understand what a visual, cultural and environmental shock Canada was to these people, I will spend today's post showing you around Fossa.

Before we go on, let me take a step backwards.  This topic has been on my mind long before I took this course.  In the spring of 2015, I was enrolled in GEOG1F90 at Brock, Human Geography.  We spent much of the course discussing "Sense of Place".  In a nutshell, a Sense of Place is the relationship one has with the geography, landscape, architecture and people of a specific place.  A