you say raaaa-chetta, I say row-chetta

I hope ya'll had good holiday celebrations. Eventually, I'll tell you about ours, but I am so far behind on blogging, so I'm just going to continue where I left off.

I was describing one of my days in Napoli with Lauren, which was about 10 days ago, now...

Several hours after our little run-in with the train officials, Lauren and I are fed, cultured from walking through the Archeological Museum, and ready to get a pizza for poor, sick Tony and head home. We decide to go back to Starita Pizza where we lunched on a thing called a "racket pizza."

 I gotta tell ya, I have this thing for comparing pizzas around here. I've eaten a lot of them, and this one takes the cake. Win. Delicious. I just couldn't live with myself if I didn't take one home to Tony. So, there we are, back at the pizza joint, where I ask our same waiter for a "row-chetta."

"Okay," he says. "Just one?"

"Yep. Solo uno," I respond.

I pay the lady at the counter, then Lauren and I stand in everyone's way while we wait for our pizza. One of the cooks hands me a bag with a deep-fried potato thing in it. "Hmm, I wonder if he wants me to eat this, " I say to Lauren. We proceed to eat it and the cooks keep pointing to napkins and we tell them how good it is and rub our bellies and thank them and continue to wait. "It tastes like a crochet," says Lauren. "Mmm," I say. I tell Lauren that I've had friends here tell me that sometimes when they were pregnant, people just gave them food. I figured this was one of those incidents. 

And we wait. I start getting the dreaded tingly pregnant legs, so I find a stool in the corner to lean on. We wait some more. The cooks (all men) continue to glance up at us and smile. We get hot, so we go out for a stroll and tell everyone we'll be back. We walk up and down the street, then check back in at the pizza shop. Everyone waves, but no pizza. We decide to wait outside and just pop our heads in once in awhile. We start felling like creepy peeping toms, so I finally go inside to ask again about the pizza.

 

Our waiter comes back with a puzzled look on his face asking what is wrong. I tell him we are patiently waiting for our pizza.

"Pizza?" he asks.

"Si. Uno row-cchetta pizza."

I see the confusion on his face melt away as he begins to apologize profusely. He definitely thought I had said, "crochet," previously, because the appropriate pronunciation for the racket pizza is "raaaaacchetta."

Lauren and I laugh about how weird we must have looked standing there eating one crochet and rubbing our bellies and waiting around like idiots. Within five minutes, our pizza is ready and we are heading out the door.

"Are you going to pay?" asks our waiter.

"Oh, I already paid," I explain, thinking that the lady behind the counter understood my pizza order in the first place and charged me for it.

We walk away, pizza in hand, laughing at our silly selves who, so recently felt pride at standing up to the man, but then didn't want to be rude to the pizza makers and demand our pizza. Suddenly, we hear our waiter flagging us down. He approaches and says, "The pizza is 7 Euro."

"Yes, I know. I paid the lady 8 Euro," I tell him. He looks hesitant, but apologizes again and heads back.

I start thinking about the money I gave to the lady behind the counter and realize that I handed her a 10 Euro bill and she gave me a whole bunch of change. I understood her to ask for 8 Euro, but suddenly that makes no sense. The cobwebs in my pregnant brain begin to clear away and it dawns on me that I paid her 80 Euro cents for 1 crochet. Duh.  There was never a moment when anyone in the pizza shop thought I had ordered a pizza.

I talk it over with Lauren and we debate about whether or not to humiliate ourselves again and go back in. We start to feel bad for our waiter, who will probably have to pay for the pizza if we don't, and then it occurs to me that I'm definitely going to want to return to this place and I don't want them to remember me as the creepy peeping tom who stole a delicious "row-cchetta" pizza. 

Once again, Lauren and I find ourselves smiling at the pizza cooks as we pay them the correct amount. The owner laughs and blames it all on the waiter saying that the waiter only understands Japanese.

We just walked away laughing and I made a promise to myself to keep practicing the Italian language and learn more of its customs, because, obviously, even after a year and a half of living here, I still don't have this place figured out.