TRAVELLING HOPEFULLY
A blog about going places and the English we find there
Travelling Hopefully · Post 05
We Take Our Chances (Pompeii, Eventually)
by Bud (Bogdan Constantin)
We slept in. I want to say this with no shame, because yesterday was long — napolitane, six pastries, one small disagreement about wafers with a man in a bakery — and today was for recovering.
We took breakfast on the terrace at half past ten, which even Stan admitted was ‘not unreasonable, given the circumstances.’ (I assume Tab 4 has a note about this. Everything has a note in Tab 4.) Wei had her coffee black and read something on her phone with the face she makes when she is deciding whether to say something out loud. I took two more coffees before anyone said anything useful, and there is evidence of a third, though I do not remember it arriving.
Then Stan opened the spreadsheet, and I knew the relaxed part of the morning was finished.
Then Stan opened the spreadsheet, and I knew the relaxed part of the morning was finished.
‘Bud,’ he said. ‘It is 10:47. The next train that gives us a useful amount of time is the 11:12. We would arrive at Pompeii at 12:20. The site is enormous. Some people spend a full day there and still do not see everything.’ He looked at Tab 2 the way people look at weather they do not trust. ‘I do not think today is the day.’
I said we should just go. I said Pompeii has been there for almost two thousand years and it was not going anywhere in the next six hours. Stan said this was ‘not the argument I think it is.’ Wei, who had said nothing for several minutes, closed her phone and said: ‘The 11:12 leaves in eighteen minutes. If we are going, we are going now.’ This settled it more than anything I said.
We ran. Stan carried his spreadsheet on his phone and read train times aloud as we went, which I found stressful and also, somehow, reassuring. I was wearing the navy jacket, which is still slightly too big at the shoulders, and I did not have time to notice this until we were already on the train.
We arrived to Pompeii a little after half past twelve. We did not have plan for which parts to see first, so we just walked, which Stan found very difficult to accept for the first twenty minutes and then, I noticed, quite enjoyable for the rest of the afternoon.
I cannot describe Pompeii properly because I do not think anyone can. You walk on streets where real people walked, and then you are standing in someone’s kitchen, or someone’s garden, or a room with paintings still on the wall after two thousand years, and it stops being a place you are visiting and starts being a place you are inside of. The plaster casts of the people — I am not going to describe those here. Some things you should just see.
A woman at the ticket office was very sympathetic when I explained about the trains and the sleeping in, and she gave us a map and told us to go to the amphitheatre first because it gets crowded later. It was more quiet as I expected, actually, for most of the afternoon — until close to closing, when a tour group arrived all at once and it stopped being quiet at all.
An announcement in Italian, then English, told us the site was closing in twenty minutes. Stan checked his phone and said, without any triumph at all, that we had seen ‘approximately forty per cent of the site, which exceeds my revised expectations.’ I told him this was a win. He said a win was not the word he would choose. I am choosing it anyway.
Before I finish, I want to say one more thing about yesterday, because Stan’s version of the napolitane story is not wrong exactly, but it is not the whole story either. Stan makes it sound like a straightforward failure — like I went looking for a biscuit and came back with a different pastry and called it a win out of stubbornness. That is not what happened. What happened is that I asked six people in Naples where to find napolitane, and six people told me six different things, and by the fourth conversation I understood that I was not looking for a biscuit anymore. I was looking for whatever it was those people were sending me toward, and it turned out to be sfogliatelle, and it turned out to be extremely good, and I do not think that is a failure. I think that is basically how travelling works.
Anyway. We are going back for the plaster casts tomorrow, if Stan allows it, and I am buying breakfast this time, so nobody can say I did not take my turn.
Not all those who wander have a working sense of direction. But we found the amphitheatre eventually.
Bud
A note on my own post, since Wei’s corrections of Post 04 will presumably arrive in due course, and I would like to have addressed some of this myself first.
First: ‘I have taken an espresso.’ I am aware this is not correct. I want to state, before Wei explains it below, that I have understood the distinction for some time. I have an espresso. I had an espresso. I do not take one, apparently, in English, though I do in Romanian, where the same verb applies to almost everything. This is confusing. I stand by my confusion.
Second: ‘the best thing I have ate.’ Yes. I know. Eaten. I have known this since Post 01, when Bud made the same category of error with ‘have spend.’ I would like the record to show that I know the rule. I simply did not apply it, on this one occasion, while writing quickly in a café.
Third: I want to note that Bud will likely describe our departure for Pompeii today as chaotic. It was not chaotic. It was compressed. There is a difference, and I have written about it at length in Tab 4, under a sub-category I created this morning: Compressed, Not Chaotic.
I am writing this from the train back from Pompeii. Stan is recalculating something. Bud is asleep against the window, still in the jacket. I have reviewed Bud’s post.
There are several errors, and one of them we have been promising to address since Post 04.
First: take vs have for food and drink. Bud writes ‘we took breakfast’ and ‘I took two more coffees.’ In English, we do not take a meal or a drink. We have them, or, less formally, we eat or drink them. The correct versions: ‘we had breakfast,’ ‘I had two more coffees.’ This is the same error Stan made in Post 04 (‘I have taken an espresso’), and we said then that we would return to it. This is us returning to it. I will also note, for the record, that Bud writes ‘Wei had her coffee black’ — the correct verb, used without apparent effort, when describing someone other than himself. This is either progress or an accident. I am not yet certain which.
Second: article omission. Bud writes ‘we did not have plan for which parts to see first.’ English requires an article before a singular countable noun like this: ‘we did not have a plan.’ Romanian allows this kind of omission more freely than English does.
Third: preposition substitution. ‘We arrived to Pompeii.’ In English, you arrive at a place, or in a city. You do not arrive to it. The correct sentence: ‘We arrived at Pompeii’ or ‘We arrived in Pompeii.’
Fourth: comparative structure. ‘It was more quiet as I expected.’ In English, comparatives take than, not as. The correct sentence is: ‘It was more quiet than I expected.’ We noted this same pattern as background texture in Post 04 and said nothing about it at the time. We are saying something about it now.
Bud also describes a woman at the ticket office as ‘very sympathetic.’ We covered sympathetic in Post 01. I have no further notes on this.
Four errors corrected. Fifteen remain. Bud wrote this post.
Which sentence is correct?
Which sentence is correct?
New posts coming soon!