Learning Italian at work led to a decade living abroad

I’d never been to Italy, and had only a superficial appreciation of the culture, but I was bored on night shift and Duolingo was free.

Photo by Henrique Ferreira on Unsplash

Have you ever worked the night shift? I did it for most of my working life, and it was usually by choice.

The managers all went home. The dress code was optional. Night shift meant holding down the fort until morning, with a lot of free time for playing games or writing or whatever you enjoyed doing to pass the time.

My last job in America was in an emergency dispatch center. Some nights it was busy, hectic, and genuinely stressful. Other nights it was slow, with the occasional call interrupting the boredom inside our high-security box.

So I started learning Italian, mostly because I’d always worn swim bikinis, or speedos as they’re known in the United States, and wanted to experience the beach in a place where prudish people didn’t think it was weird. Oh, and the pizza. Yeah, the pizza.

I’d studied Spanish for years, including a minor in university. The similarities were obvious. But the letters made different sounds and the grammar wasn’t exactly the same.

Learning a language is a lot like going to the gym. It’s rough in the beginning, but after a few months you hit your stride.

It wasn’t long before I was singing along with Italian songs, laughing at funny YouTube videos, and telling off my coworkers in Italian — complete with hand gestures.

I fell in love with cute Italian words like coccolino, piccolino, farfalla, micio (kitten), and quirky phrases like in bocca al lupo (in the mouth of the wolf; it means good luck).

My salary at the time wasn’t anything to brag about, but I’d been riding my single-speed bike to work and living in a studio apartment in the Capital Hill neighborhood of Denver. I’d managed to save some money.

So late one night, as I checked my bank account, I started typing up my resignation email. I pressed send. I booked a one-way flight to Catania and an Airbnb for three months in Palermo.

A few months later, I was crossing the Atlantic.

That wasnearly ten years ago, and I’ve only been back to the U.S. twice.

Since then, I’ve been back and forth to Mexico, surfed in the Canary Islands, danced all night in Kyiv’s nightclubs before returning to my Soviet-built apartment, bathed in the baths of Budapest, barbecued in the Bulgarian mountains, swam in the Mediterranean Sea countless times, plunged into the cold rivers and lakes of Bavaria, went wild at Berlin Pride, fell in love with a Romanian, and sampled khinkali in Tblisi, Georgia.

I’ve also been robbed, and once I became ill after standing in the cold, Serbian rain for hours while waiting for a bus that never came. I missed trains, endured Covid-19 lockdowns and travel restrictions, went broke, and consumed far too much Eastern European alcohol.

But I survived and kept going.

Since Covid, I’ve made my home on the Albanian Riviera in a small resort town. I have legal residency. The beach is a five minute walk. The locals are friendly (and patient with my terrible Albanian). I no longer drink alcohol.

I still speak Italian to the thousands of tourists who flock to Albania in the summer for blue waters and cheaper prices. They laugh and shout “bravo” when I sing Italian songs on karaoke night.

It was a small decision to learn Italian — something broken down into bite-sized pieces on a free language learning app. But that small decision led to adventure and a life abroad.

What will your next small decision amount to?