Red or White and Blue

I leave for my honeymoon in just over a month.

For those of you keeping score at home (mostly the single ladies) - I'll have been married five months tomorrow (thank god for Google Calendars). So we are running kinda late on this whole honeymoon thing. I guess we were just waiting for gas prices to go up.

So in just over a month we will be leaving for Italy. My wife, being Italian, is excited to see her family that she hasn't seen in a few years. Me, as an alcoholic fatty, I'm excited for homemade wine and pasta.

Since she is fluent in Italian, and the only thing I am fluent in is flatulence, she has been trying to teach me how to speak some basic words and phrases.

I thought this was a great idea - what happens if her and I were to get separated in downtown Rome? How would I find her? Or a phone? Or more importantly, some homemade wine?

With this in mind, she began her lessons. The first word was "grattugia".

This word requires you to roll your R's and not be a complete idiot. Which means I failed miserably. It felt like my tongue was a drunk bum stumbling down the street - or like it had eaten too much Chipotle and now just wanted to watch Wings reruns on the couch.

So we worked through it until I could kinda maybe say something that sounded somewhat like "grattugia".

Proud of myself for having mastered the Italian language I asked what this word meant. Her response?

"Cheese grater"

CHEESE GRATER!

At what point on my Italian honeymoon am I going to need to say "cheese grater"???

If we get separated in the middle of Rome, am I just going to scream out "GRATTUGIA!" and find my way home?

So now we only focus on words that will be of use during the trip.

Like "vino".