il secondo giorno e sempre peggio piu il primo

 Ieri (Perche, raramente ho abbastanza tempo per scriberlo nello stesse giorno) abbiamo mangiato un ristorante indiano che era aperto durante l'Eid. Ero molto sorpreso! Di solito, tutti i negozi sono chiusi per l'Eid, perche tutti i lavorati sono Muslim. Abbiamo fatto una buena cena per questo ristorante.

Anche noi siamo andati a giocare a pickleball. I ragazzi non hanno potuto giocare per 2 mesi, perche i genitori erano troppo impegnati! Si sono divertiti molto, sebbene Dominic (il mio figlio maggiore) ha perso entrambe le partite. Nonnostante, si e divertito, e quindi, vuole giocare pickleball ogni settimana da ora in poi. 

The struggle is real and the making of sentences is slow. But I am inspired by Jhumpa Lahiri, who in her "Il altro parolo", decided to just get in there and learn Italian actively instead of hiding behind the selfsame shield that I have hidden behind for months. She feels that she "can be a real stranger" in Italian, and has self consciously converted her writing language to Italian, as she "felt like a stranger in Bengali" - and brought up the concept that you can be a complete imbecile  in your own so called mother tongue.  

What use is being born with Bengali if you cannot read, cannot write, and can barely order a meal in Calcutta, let alone "translate the work of Moravia", as Lahiri went on to do in the long term? 

I have taken to reading random passages of the Gospels in Italian with the side by side English New Jerusalem translation. What other book is there out there in which I am almost completely familiar with the cadences and phrases, and contains a fair bit of dialogue (hence why I am not using the Books of Joshua, for instance, for this language project)? The Gospels are essentially the perfect work of literature for this purpose - they even have parables which I imagine are written in Italian in the same convivial storytelling voice that the English ones set out to achieve!

So yes. The Gospels in Italian. What better way to deepen the faith where laziness sets in? 

At the end of every blog post - I will manually type out a line of Dante, as I am assured that it is going to be very, very good for the Italian learning experience. 

Nel mezzo di cammin di nostra vita,

mi ritrovai per una selva oscura,

che la diritta via era smarrita.

When halfway through my journey of our life

I found that I was in a gloomy wood

Because the path which was direct was lost.

Alright that wasn't so bad - I managed to understand that without too much difficulty. But as the title of the blog says, "the second day is always worse than the first".