Our landlord wrote for several newspapers and also had several published non-fiction books. He invited me to attend a 9/11 memorial with him at the American School of The Hague - he was covering the speech the American ambassador was scheduled to deliver. The invitation he emailed me was in American English and said that the event was on for 7:00. He knocked on our front door early that morning and berated me for not being dressed and ready (he always wore a suit and a tie). I had to tell him that it was scheduled for 7:00 pm, not 7:00 am! His reaction was really funny…
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That’s great.
I had a study abroad in Leiden. Those professors holy shit what a wake up call from my cushy student life in USA.
I still learned some stuff that has been really useful in California.
My life is a lot different now but I can still roll out my Dutch skills when called upon.
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I must say, Boston or Austin weren’t quite the places I was imagining 
I was thinking of places 0-100,000 or so.
Inspired by @brucesw 's Texas thread.
Also since I’m in a (relatively) small area.
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brucesw - Have you put your finger on it yet? You never know how these threads will turn out.
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We lived in Wassenaar. We loved Leiden - spent a lot of time there!!
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He and I had a conversation about the hipness of San Angelo
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That’s great !
Really fun times over there. Winters were cold enough folks skated around town and there were kegs under bridges !
My brother lived in Utrecht which was also a lot of fun.
I miss it !
I still think febo is a viable business for some places here in the USA. I love that place. De lekkerste.
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There are some nice Italian restaurants in Carmel, Ca ( population ~3800 ).
Café Reyes in Point Reyes Station, population 210. (haven’t been to Café Reyes. I’ve dined in Olema)
Marin county, while ultracool, does not qualify as normal little town culture.
Carmel, no also, though my ex’s aunt and her partner live in Los Osos.
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Just thinking of little towns with good restaurants.
I had a nice Italian meal in a small town in Ontario in March 2020, but the restaurant closed during the first wave.
I don’t really think of a 100 000 person city as a small town.
A town with 1-5000 people, and a good Italian restaurant, is what I’d be looking for.
Of course- the smaller towns that are in tourist areas with seasonal traffic are more likely to have good restaurants.
While this isn’t an Italian restaurant, I had a nice meal at a restaurant in Broderick, SK, in 2018. Population 85. Not a tourist destination, but a dining destination for rural people. https://www.terracediningroomsteakhouse.com/
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Eh, from the perspective of Nanty Glo, Altoona is cool. You have the mallo cup factory!
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Curious - can you expand on this? Did they just cook something until it was so dry it combusted? Or was there some kind of crinkly foil involved?
hi @CCE no foil, just stuff that has sugar, cheese, tomato sauce, peanut butter, microwave popcorn too…basically not well supervised so my fault they didn’t know timing and didn’t watch it. i think lessons have been learned at this point by all!
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Quite a bit of that going on - you might say it’s becoming most ubiquitous.
When did “ultimate” become synonymous with “extraordinary”?
Does that mean antepenultimate is ordinary and penultimate is better than average?
There’s a pun in there somewhere.
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I’m passable in German, although it’s dropping off rapidly now that I don’t visit as much. A guy who worked for me grew up in China through his BS/MS degrees, then moved to Paris for his PhD (FR gov attracting STEM grad immigrants with free PhD + stipend at Institut Curie). He stayed on as a post doc for a few years and became proficient in French, then moved to the US and became fluent (if heavily accented in a weird way - CN accent plus FR accent atop English) and extremely literate grammatically - I’d have him review department memos before I sent them out and he always improved them.
We visited Basel, CH several times for work. Places like Geneva are heavily French speaking and Zurich is more heavily German speaking, but Basel is the only place I visited where people would start off a sentence in German and finish it in French. And even more often speak a sentence primarily in German, but use 4 or 8 French substituted words, too.
In those cases, we’d have to put our heads together and muddle out the meaning.
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I speak basic German, semi-fluent French, basic Spanish and a few words of Greek and Italian. I often commingle my words the first week I’m overseas.
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I speak native level English (often better than some native speakers I’ve encountered 
), a little conversational French, Spanish, Italian, Greek.
Like several other posters, my strengths lie mostly within food or restaurant-related terms.
I wish I could speak both French & Spanish as well as English, but that ain’t ever gonna happen.
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You certainly write English better than many native speakers.
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German ???
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Impressive.
I wish I could just speak English. Even at a “foreign” level.
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