It was a muggy afternoon in Marrakech, and I was sweating slightly as I made my way through the souk, dodging mopeds belching clouds of grey smoke and flattening myself up against walls to make room for the donkey-drawn carts that kept rushing by. My purse was twisting awkwardly around me as I walked, bouncing wildly off my hip with every step, but I couldn’t stop to adjust it because one of my hands was clutching several flimsy plastic bags bulging with hand-woven baskets, ceramic bowls and more spices than I could probably ever manage to cook my way through, and the other hand was gripping an oversize antique silver tea tray wrapped in unwieldily layers of cardboard and lashed together with twine. I looked like a caricature: Tourist girl gets lost in the souk and emerges several hours later laden down with every kind of good imaginable. I almost expected a camel to trot out after me.

Nearly two and a half years after my first visit, I was back in Morocco. Back, and throwing myself once again into the spiders’ web of tiny, tangled alleys that make up Marrakech’s labyrinth of a medina.

The thing about Marrakech, the thing that had hooked me from the moment I first arrived and then drew me back again after two years, is that the city feels like something straight out of a storybook, a movie or a myth. It feels like it’s stretched between two incompatible time periods, where men in hooded djellabas and pointed leather slippers smoke and sip tea and artisans labor away in darkened, haze-filled alleys, hammering intricate designs into silver tea trays while mopeds – dusty, rickety ones from the 1970s, with pedals and bicycle-like seats – swerve their way down narrow streets heaving with activity. In some places, it’s almost impossible to stop moving; as soon as you come to a standstill, people are squeezing past you like a human river and you suddenly find yourself directly in the path of an oncoming donkey and cart.

There’s always some kind of fragrance hanging in the air, changing constantly as you walk. It’s smoke, it’s a meaty tagine simmering on hot coals, it’s raw spices, sharp and intensely aromatic, and then it shifts to something more pungent, hot metal, exhaust, something sour and animal that hits you in the back of your throat, and then smoke again. The noise, too, is always swirling around, clanking, buzzing, conversation in Arabic and French, shopkeepers calling out to passing tourists, the shrillness of a snake charmer’s horn in the chaotic Djemma-El-Fna square, and then the call to prayer, a haunting multi-layered chanting song without a melody that drifts down from the mosques and wraps itself around everything else.

I had assumed, foolishly, that it would be easier to find my way around the city this time. After all, I was staying in the same place as before – a traditional riad tucked into a corner of the medina – and my sense of direction isn’t bad at all. I had also assumed that I wouldn’t find the city so intense the second time around – that culture shock hits once, like lightening, for each place visited, and then recedes to leave a kind of calm in its wake. The thing about Morocco, though, is that the culture feels opaque and impenetrable when you’re on the outside looking in. For all the cups of mint tea you slurp down, for all the times you practice your Arabic greetings and thank-yous on shopkeepers, there is not even the slimmest chance that you will blend in. No matter how carefully you dress to avoid offending the country’s Islamic cultural norms, no matter how much you try to recede into the crowd, the truth is inescapable: You will stand out. Particularly when you’re a five-foot-nine girl (Moroccan women tend to be tiny and squat), pale-faced, wide-eyed and clutching a camera.

As I made my way down the street, I could feel eyeballs boring into me from all directions. An old man walked up and briefly touched my hair before giving me a crooked-toothed grin. Another man, swerving past on a beat-up bicycle, offered up a soft “bonjour, la gazelle” – the Moroccan version of a pick-up line that seemed to follow me around the city – before gliding around the corner. A pair of women, one in a billowing black burka and the other in a bright purple head scarf, stared at me with undisguised curiosity as they walked past. And as I trudged along, the calls of the shopkeepers, squatting outside their stores on little wooden stools, followed me.

“Bonjour, ça va? Hello! Hello! Français? English? Madam, please! Just to look at my shop, just to look! Madam, please!”

To walk through Marrakech’s medina – the souks in particular – you need to submit yourself to this kind of relentless marketing. Eventually you realize that it takes much more effort to refuse these invitations than it does to give a cursory glance to a shop’s wares, drop a few compliments, and then extract yourself, moving a few metres away before repeating the entire process all over again.

Time after time, I found myself being pulled into a tiny, dusty shop where an overly eager vendor would begin the process of hawking his goods. Everything was “very special”. Everything was “not costing very much”. Carpets were pulled from towering stacks and layered one over another in front of me until my exit path was effectively blocked with a tower of richly patterned wool. Jars of jasmine and myrrh – deeply perfumed in a heavy, ancient sort of way – were wafted under my nose, and leather babouches were pressed into my hands.

In the middle of Rahba Kedima, a sunlight-flooded square packed with merchants and fringed with spice venders, cafés and dark passages into the depths of the souk, I briefly made eye contact with a man selling woven bread baskets, which were piled behind him on the pavement in a haphazard heap of straw and bright colours. Seconds later – perhaps reading that accidental eye contact as a desperate desire to buy – he was trotting along behind me, arms laden down with the cone-shaped baskets, trying his absolute hardest to extoll the virtues of what was quite possibly one of the most simple products in existence:

“Madam, it is only costing twenty dirhams! Madam, it is authentic Moroccan way to serve your bread – no home is complete without it. Madam, your husband will surely appreciate the proper presentation of bread!”

After he had followed me around several corners and into the heart of the souk, I spun around and told him that my husband had already bought me a bread basket and had forbidden me to buy another.

In fact, this mythical husband proved himself to be quite useful throughout the week. During my first visit to the city I made the mistake of letting shopkeepers know that I was travelling alone, a foolish and naïve slip-up that almost inevitably led to some sort of offhand marriage proposal: You want these tea glasses for free? Marry me. You want to find your way back to your riad? Follow me, then marry me. This year, I was more prepared.

“My husband – he’s just a few stores away right now – wants me to search for some lanterns for our home”, I said, stepping into a tiny shop crammed with elaborately decorated lamps dangling just millimetres over my head.

“No, I can’t buy any more saffron, my husband said I bought too much already”, I replied to a particularly insistent spice vender. The word felt strange as it slipped out of my mouth, but it seemed to work – the fake husband lent a legitimacy to my presence that the identity of single girl travelling alone had never managed to.

Normally, I’m not a fan of shopping. I find it tiring at best, rage-inducing at its very worst. But shopping in Marrakech, like the city itself, was almost intoxicating in its exoticness. And so I bartered my way through the souk, sipping little glasses of intensely sweet mint tea while shopkeepers wrapped layers of newspaper covered in Arabic script around my purchases and fastened sheets of old cardboard to the sides of the gigantic silver tea tray I just had to have, covering the whole thing in a dense web of twine (“this is very good for the airplane”) before sending me on my way.

I got lost. I studied my map, then circled the souk once, twice, three times, each time ending up right back at my starting point. Shopkeepers looked surprised to see me pass by again, then amused, one of them calling out “Madam! What are you looking for? Spices, rugs? Teapots? A husband?” Raucous laughter followed. The sun was sinking lower, sending shimmering shafts of dust-infused light through the bamboo-slatted roof overhead and giving everything a mysterious, etherial glow. I pointed myself down yet another uncharted street, this one completely non-existent on my map, and finally emerged back into the familiar chaos of Djemma-El-Fna just as the sun dipped dramatically behind the minaret of the Koutoubia mosque.

Two days later, I watched as the baggage claim carousel in Rome’s Ciampino airport gave a loud metallic squeal and lurched into action. After a while, my suitcase tumbled out, bulging at the seams. A small chunk of Moroccan donkey dung was still stuck to one of the wheels. Minutes later, my cardboard-wrapped tea tray rolled awkwardly down the chute, looking out of place among a stream of black plastic suitcases. Miraculously, the web of twine had held together, proving that the merchant’s packaging methods for my “very special” purchase were indeed “very good for the airplane”.

For more photos from Marrakech, you can view the album on Facebook.

Two days later, I woke up feeling as though someone had hit me over the head with a frying pan, tied down my limbs with lead weights and rubbed my throat raw with sandpaper, all the while surrounding me in a blanket of ice cubes. To be honest, I’m not actually sure if I had a true flu or just a very, very bad cold, but the details are irrelevant – either way, the last thing I felt like doing was hauling myself out of bed and working. Even my usual morning cappuccino held absolutely no appeal, which, for me, was more revealing than the temperature on the thermometer.

Given that this was the first time I’d gotten sick since moving to Rome, I wasn’t quite sure how to approach the whole thing. Back in Victoria, I would have pulled on a ratty old pair of yoga pants and a sweatshirt, hopped into the car, and driven to the nearest Pharmasave or London Drugs, where I would have made a quick three-minute circuit of the store to stock up on Advil, decongestants, crackers, kleenex and a stack of magazines – all without speaking to anyone – before flinging myself back into the car and subsequently back into bed, all within the space of fifteen minutes.

This is not possible in Rome. To begin with, there is no equivalent to Pharmasave or London Drugs (or any of those drugstore chains) here. Drugstores in North America are cavernous, warehouse-like emporiums packed with not just pharmaceuticals, but cosmetics, greeting cards, electronics, snacks, and, well, almost anything. At the drugstore just down the road from my old apartment in Victoria, it would have been entirely possible to buy a new computer, some kitchen equipment and a handful of new lipstick shades all while waiting for a prescription to be filled. The first time I walked into a pharmacy in Rome, then, I wasn’t looking for medication, but for a bottle of shampoo and some lip gloss. I quickly learned, after spending nearly fifteen Euro on an undersize bottle of specialty pharmacist-designed shampoo in an elaborately decorated package while not finding a single tube of lip gloss, that things worked differently now.

The pharmacies here are, generally, tiny and intimidating shops that are either brilliantly modern with crisp white surfaces and clean lines, or so ancient-looking that it feels like they’ve been around since the beginning of medical history itself. Either way, there will be a team of authoritative pharmacists clad in white lab coats staring you down as soon as the door swings open, and either way, nearly all of the products – including bandaids and the most innocent of painkillers possible – will be kept behind the counter, where you will have to specifically request them.

The pharmacy closest to my apartment is of the ancient-looking, wood-panelled, frescoed-ceiling type that feels both intimidating and incredibly reassuring. I shuffled in, cheeks flushed and kleenex at the ready, and within seconds a woman in skyscraper-high stiletto heels was asking me what I needed. Speaking Italian is difficult when your brain is caught in a feverish fog and your voice sounds hoarse and strangled, but I soon emerged with slim little boxes of painkillers (which proved to be effective) and decongestants (which proved to be useless), both of which the pharmacist took the time to individually and precisely wrap in multiple layers of tissue paper emblazoned with the pharmacy’s name.

The next day I pulled myself off the couch, got dressed, and styled my hair (in Rome, the bed-head and yoga pants look really doesn’t cut it, even when you’re sick) just to make the two minute walk back to that same pharmacy so that I could beg another pharmacist – this one a distinguished-looking older guy with piercing eyes behind little blue-rimmed glasses – for something that would help me stop coughing. He wordlessly vanished into a back room, and then returned a few minutes later with a little box and a self-assured expression. What was it? I wasn’t sure. How did it work? I didn’t know. When a lab coat-clad pharmacist hands you a product with such extreme confidence written all over his face, you don’t start asking questions (especially when you don’t even know how to ask those questions). You just assume he knows what he’s talking about, and take it (which I did, and it worked miracles).

And as for those crackers and magazines, both of which are so necessary for surviving a flu? Since the pharmacists obviously didn’t have stacks of Vogue Italia or boxes of saltines in their mysterious back room, I had to drag myself first to the grocery store, where there were very few types of crackers not flavoured like pizza or designed to become bruschetta, and then to the edicola, where I guiltlessly stocked up on this season’s fashion bibles. Because if there’s one thing that those all-knowing pharmacists forgot to mention, it’s the fact that a stack of glossy magazines makes a flu go away just a tiny little bit faster.

It goes without saying, then, that the security line is not the kind of place where you’d expect to receive a spontaneous marriage proposal from a complete stranger.

I was going through the process of systematically ridding myself of all metal objects – belt, necklace, stray coins in pocket – while simultaneously shaking my laptop free of its case and trying to stuff it, along with my coat and purse, into one small plastic bin, when one of the security staff planted himself in front of me.

“I’m sorry, bella,” he said with an apologetic smile, “but if it is not too much of a problem, could you remove your boots, please?”

I sighed, having watched a pair of boot-clad feet march their way successfully through the metal detector only seconds earlier, but bent down and tugged off my knee-high boots.

“And your scarf, please, cara.” I obediently unwrapped the scarf. The security guy’s smile widened. As he took the boots and scarf from me and dropped them haphazardly onto the x-ray machine’s conveyor belt, he muttered something that sounded suspiciously like “will you marry me”, which I promptly disregarded as a simple misunderstanding or a massive translation error, because obviously there was no way that a man who had only laid eyes on me seconds earlier would be proposing marriage to me, right?

Wrong. A few seconds later he turned to face me again and repeated, very clearly this time, and very much in English, “will you marry me?”

I’ve never before been quite so eager to dash through the metal detector and to the relative safety on the opposite side.

Two days later, I found myself wandering through the Munich airport in search of some decent coffee to keep me adequately caffeinated for the flight. This airport was everything the Rome airport was not – sleek, airy, packed with upscale shops and restaurants – but for all its glossiness, it was proving nearly impossible to find a shot of espresso that didn’t come from a suspicious-looking fully automated machine with a three-Euro price tag attached to it.

On my second lap around the terminal, I suddenly noticed the smell of espresso – good espresso – wafting tantalizingly  past me. Looking around, I spotted a small sign advertising a coffee bar and pointing down a nondescript staircase into some less-glamorous annexed area of the airport – the sign was written not in German, like every other sign in the airport, but in Italian, and as it turned out, that little section of the airport was dedicated entirely to an airline offering flights into Italy.

And so I descended the staircase and found myself swallowed up by Italy. Disorganized crowds packed the departure gates. Dramatic hand gestures were everywhere. Loud mobile phone conversations filled the air. And through all the chaos came the unmistakable sound of ceramic cups clinking against saucers – the coffee bar.

I ordered my caffè macchiato confidently in Italian, then struck up a conversation with the barista about why a Canadian girl who spoke (some) Italian was here, in Munich, draining every last drop of an airport macchiato as though it were liquid gold. And after setting the cup back down with a satisfying clank, I thanked the barista and turned to leave.

“Aspetta, aspetta,” he called after me. “I have a question for you! Are you married?” I shook my head, grinning, but continued towards the staircase.

His voice followed me up the stairs: “I would marry you! I would marry you right away!”

Of course, that’s not entirely true. In reality, there was a little wad of several fifty-Euro bills tucked between my Visa card and my bank card, the Visa having laid nearly dormant since my arrival in Rome and the bank card useless except as a means to withdraw still more fifty-Euro bills from the ATM. The problem was that any attempt to use one of those bills to buy something costing less than, say, forty Euros in total had proved to be an exercise in frustration and rejection rather than an effective commercial activity, effectively rendering the bills themselves almost worthless.

I’m not quite sure what it is that makes Italian shopkeepers react so negatively towards large bills. It’s almost as though they’re scared of reaching into a specific section of their cash registers, or worried that accepting a fifty-Euro bill now means possibly not having enough small change to give to someone else at some unspecified point later in the day. Try sliding a fifty across the counter to pay for your lunchtime panino, and you’ll find it handed right back to you along with a not-so-apologetic claim of “non è possibile!” and a request for more exact change.

And so I’ve begun to adapt: I hoard small change, which will be doled out in exchange for cornetti and bus tickets and endless shots of espresso. The twenty-Euro bills are strategically used in a way that’ll maximize the number of highly-versitile five- and ten-Euro bills returned as change, and – because very few things in day-to-day life here cost anywhere close to an amount justifying a larger bill – the fifties are continually pushed to the back of the wallet, where they’ll languish, unused, until one day…

…I reached into my wallet to pay for the cappuccino and realized that there was no more change left, no more small bills to use up. Even scrabbling around at the bottom of the purse, a dark wasteland which at times can yield truly amazing amounts of cash, barely resulted in enough coins to cover a caffè. It was inevitable – the next purchase was going to have to break a fifty.

This was where the strategic planning always came into play.

I could not hand over the fifty in the forno, where the formerly sour-faced cashier and I have formed a sort of tentative friendly bond based on the way she always laughs at how I buy the exact same thing every morning then always pay for it with a one-Euro coin; she slides the ten cents of change towards me before I’ve even had the chance to dig my wallet out of my purse – and sometimes, before I’ve even had a chance to place my order.

I couldn’t use the bill at the bar, because, well, I like their coffee and their cheerful morning banter too much to throw a wrench – or an over-valued piece of paper – into their cash register. Besides, if there’s one thing you don’t mess with, it’s the place that produces your morning dose of caffeine.

Also off-limits were the market (where any amount larger than ten Euros sets off a chain reaction of one vendor walking over to another to try to hunt down the correct change) and the grocery store (where, as far as I can tell, the only hiring criteria they rigorously adhere to is perpetual grumpiness).

In the end, as I have before, I used the fifty-Euro bill to buy a ball of mozzarella di bufala costing all of €4.50 in the tiny little cheese shop just off Campo de’ Fiori. Because at that cheese shop, there’s a lovely little old man who sits behind the cash register, carefully counting out change all day long with a big smile plastered on his face while his family handles the cheese selection and slicing activities. I suspect that he might not remember quite everything, otherwise he might not be so quick to hand me a stack of ten-Euro bills in exchange for my fifty. But whatever the reason, he’s always still smiling while the cash drawer slides shut, and I’m smiling as I saunter out of the store with my newfound purchasing power, and all is once again right in the universe – well, at least until the next trip to the ATM.

Termini at 6:45 on a Saturday morning felt like it was wrapped in a foggy, tired haze. As usual, I arrived with far too much time to spare, so I wandered into a bar and lingered over a cappuccino and a cornetto for as long as possible – sipping, then staring off off into space, then slowly sipping again. Around me, people threw back inky shots of espresso before disappearing onto trains.

Observed on the train: A pack of American backpackers stuffing a pile of luggage into the overhead bin, sweating after sprinting down the platform and complaining loudly about the early morning departure time. One of them pulls a bag full of beer bottles out of his backpack; the others exchange high-fives and exclamations over how “epic” their journey is going to be. Fifteen minutes later they’ve all fallen asleep, slumped against the windows and draped sloppily over the tables. Silence descends over the train carriage.

As always, I started off the trip with the best of intentions. I opened my laptop, positioned it on the table in front of me, then promptly became engrossed in watching the Italian countryside streak by at 250 kilometres an hour. First there were suburbs, blocks of apartments intersected by highways and railway lines, then hills dotted with vineyards and villages and punctuated by long, dark tunnels. I’ve taken trains on this exact route several times before, but never so early in the morning, and never enough to get tired of the way the scenery changes: By the time the train reached the outskirts of Florence, the view had become decidedly Tuscan.

Cipolla. It’s a simple enough word – short, no tricky “r” sounds to roll around on the tongue – but I had learned it wrong from day one, read it wrong straight out of the textbook and burned that incorrect pronunciation directly into my brain before putting it to almost daily use at markets all across the city. Five months’ worth of onions. Five months’ worth of awkward mispronunciation. Even now, as I type all this, I’m still saying it wrong inside my head. CI-polla? No, Ci-POL-la.

The correct pronunciation was revealed to me by a woman wearing gigantic, dark sunglasses. We were crowded up against the counter of Panificio Bonci and it was my turn to order; I had been eyeing a slab of pizza bianca topped with copious amounts of onion. The word had barely left my mouth before the lady in the sunglasses turned sharply towards me, and I could sense that behind those dark lenses, her eyes were narrowing.

“Ci-POL-la”, she hissed, her lips twisting into an expression of distaste as though it physically pained her to hear me butchering her beautiful language.

“Ci-POL-la”, I repeated dutifully, feeling disconcerted. How was it possible that nobody had corrected me before now? Not the guy at the farmer’s market this morning, who had cheerfully dropped a handful of onions into my shopping bag, not the lady at the fruit and vegetable stand that I frequent at Mercato Trionfale… no one. Were it not for the lady in the sunglasses, I would have continued my mispronunciation, driving the wrong sounds deeper and deeper into my brain every time an onion popped up on my grocery list.

And this, of course, begs the question: How many more Italian words am I habitually butchering, all the while blissfully unaware of the way I’m mangling the Italian language?

I tell people that I don’t wear high-heeled shoes because I’m afraid of getting stuck in the cobblestones and killing myself, but that’s only half the truth – I don’t wear high-heeled shoes because I’d tower over ninety percent of the population here. Next to me, the average Roman appears almost pocket-sized.

Rome’s weather is constantly proving itself to be every bit as dramatic as the Romans themselves, oscillating between torrential downpours and incredibly blue skies at a rate that seems almost scientifically implausible. When I woke up this morning, it was to the sound of rain pelting furiously down on the tile rooftops across the courtyard from my bedroom window and hitting the little roof over the kitchen balcony with massive, deafening splashes. It seemed darker than usual, in a fairly ominous way, and I could see the television aerials on nearby buildings swaying in the wind.

I ventured out of the apartment in a pair of tall rubber rain boots, a heavy coat and my coziest scarf, gigantic umbrella held low over my head. Twenty minutes later, the rain slowed to a dribble, then stopped. Clouds shifted to reveal blue. The wind lightened itself into a stiff breeze. Soon I was clomping down nearly-dry streets in my rain boots, a damp umbrella dangling limply at my side.

This morning I watched as an elderly lady with unnaturally dark eyebrows and a heavy fur coat marched into the bar and pushed her way through a tangle of people in order to position herself at the counter, wedged right in between two businessmen sipping cappuccinos. Catching the barista’s attention, she demanded “un caffè ristretto al vetro, molto caldo” – an extra strong, extra-hot espresso served in glass rather than a ceramic cup. A few moments later, a profusely steaming shot glass with maybe a centimetre of inky coffee lurking in the bottom was slid onto the counter; she grabbed it, and without adding any of the sugar that Italians are so fond of dumping into their coffee, drained it in one quick, decisive motion. The businessmen beside her were still placidly swirling their cappuccinos around in their cups.

Let’s start with the kisses. Nothing presents an environment more rife with opportunities for extreme social blunders than the exchange of multiple kisses with an assortment of people ranging from good friends to near strangers, especially for someone who’s grown up in a culture with a healthy appreciation for the concept of personal space and the belief that a good firm handshake is one of the best ways to greet people who don’t yet fall inside the boundaries of the friend zone.

When I arrived in Italy, the kisses terrified me. The first few people who attempted to greet me this way likely saw a flash of bewilderment and panic flood across my face as they leaned in towards me; second nature for them was unnatural for me. I honed my kissing technique over the next few months, surreptitiously watching and taking mental notes as people all around me exchanged effortless baci without a shred of hesitation, and eventually I started to think that I had made some solid, measurable improvements. I was more fluid, less likely to get confused over which side of the face I was supposed to move towards first, better at concealing those little flashes of panic. But this weekend, while meeting up with a group outside of a restaurant in Testaccio before a dinner together, I exchanged kisses with a friend, and then a friend of a friend – someone I had only met once before – which prompted an astute observer in the group to comment on how stiff and awkward I looked: “I guess you don’t greet with kisses in Canada, do you?”

Of course, hearing this did nothing to take away my remaining anxiety over the kisses, which have a plethora of factors to stress over and then subsequently screw up. Consider the variables: Do you press your cheeks together? Peck the air beside the cheek with no facial contact whatsoever? Or do you settle for something in the middle; the briefest of cheek-to-cheek glances, the slightest suggestion of contact? And then there’s the kiss itself – are you expected to actually make a small smooching sound into the air, or should the kisses be silent, implied only by the cheek-to-cheek motion? Months of observation and somewhat hesitant participation indicates that any of these situations could happen: One person might make a nearly-deafening smacking noise directly in front of your ear, while the next might silently graze their cheek against yours in an almost disinterested way. As far as I can tell, there is an unwritten code of kissing, and the only way to know this code is to actually be Italian, or to learn it very slowly, through trial and error – and really, mostly error.

Greetings aside, there’s the issue of conversation: As the only outsider, the sole foreigner invited to join a group of friends capable of talking incomprehensible, rapid-fire Italian circles around you, do you follow the smile-and-nod routine, in which you latch yourself onto one of the conversations taking place around the table, desperately attempting to follow what’s being said and laugh in all the right places while not being at all sure if you actually have even a remotely correct sense of the conversation’s true meaning, or do you try to actually contribute, thereby subjecting the entire table to the linguistic equivalent of a toddler attempting to join an adult’s conversation? Alternately, should you feel bad when the others switch to English – at the expense of their own enjoyment, I’m sure – to make sure you’re properly included? As enjoyable as the dinner inevitably is, the whole situation is draped in a thin veil of unease.

Even the food itself jumps at the opportunity to underline and embolden those little cultural differences. Everybody else will known what to order, how much wine to drink, when to suggest sharing and how many courses to eat – and they will, without a doubt, know how to eat everything properly without appearing to be uncultured or completely lacking in hand-eye coordination and basic fork-usage skills.

I made the mistake of assuming that a plate of bucatini all’amatriciana would be an appropriate first course – after all, everybody else was ordering pasta dishes – but I had failed to consider something critical: The ease with which it can be eaten while simultaneously trying to converse in two different languages. To begin with, tomato sauce is a lethal weapon in the hands of a non-expert. If it’s not staining clothes, it’s probably flecking the white tablecloth, colourfully announcing the presence of a beginner. And then there’s the issue of noodle twirl-ability: Spaghettini might be doable, spaghetti poses some serious challenges, and bucatini… Well, bucatini is nearly impossible, at least for someone who hasn’t grown up twirling noodles on a near-daily basis. The thick, stiff strands of pasta will stubbornly refuse of curl around the fork, unwrapping themselves from the tines and sliding messily back down onto the plate just before reaching the mouth, landing in a little pile of defeat and flicking sauce everywhere in the process while the conversation comes grinding to a halt. Spoons (a beginner’s tool, apparently) will be proffered and lessons in pasta twirling will be offered up, but by that point my face has turned as red as the tomato sauce on the plate in front of me. It’s too late. Just like the kisses – something so effortless for the Italians – a simple plate of pasta has turned into a demonstration of tiny cultural contrasts.

As far as I can tell, there are only two solutions to this issue. The first involves hiding in the apartment under strict isolation, which is the only failsafe guarantee against cultural blunders. The other involves putting on dark-coloured clothes and then ordering the challenging pasta, laughing over misunderstandings in a conversation even as you feel the blush creeping up your cheeks, and kissing prolifically – kissing hello, kissing goodbye – until you’ve exchanged so many baci that you begin to understand that elusive unwritten code of kissing conduct.

I arrived at this conclusion after spotting several bright red trucks with “Corriere Espresso” emblazoned on their sides in bold white letters – I knew that corriere meant “courier”, and I assumed, foolishly, in the way that people do when they’re just taking their first tentative steps into a new language, that espresso could only mean one thing: Coffee.

It made sense, considering that it’s impossible to walk more than a few metres in this city without stumbling on yet another bar serving up cup after cup of coffee all day long. And my belief was only strengthened when I saw one of the trucks screech to a stop outside of a bar – obviously, it was delivering the week’s supply of coffee to one of its clients.

One day, while walking across Piazza Farnese with an Italian friend, I watched a delivery guy hauling several large boxes out of the back of one of those red trucks. I made an offhand comment, something to the effect of “wow, I can’t believe how much coffee Italians go through – it’s a good thing they’ve got a special delivery network to keep everyone supplied”, and watched, a little puzzled, as a confused expression slid across her face. Surely she knew about her own city’s espresso courier?

And then, a few days later, I happened across one of the other definitions for espresso: Express. Fast.

Express courier.

The kind of courier that was much, much more likely to be delivering business documents and packages ordered online than darting around from bar to bar, keeping the city’s caffeine habit amply supplied.

This kind of thing, I suppose, is like a version of car trouble for the non-car-owner: There’s nothing left to do but brake hard, pull over, and assess the problem. Only in this case, pulling over meant hauling a bike over to the railing of an ornate bridge adorned with massive stone sculptures while il Tevere rushed by underneath, and – unfortunately – no tow truck to call. But being a girl of action, I attempted to deal with the situation myself. The chain had wedged itself in place; even after my increasingly frustrated tugging it remained firmly stuck, while a large amount of black grease migrated from the chain onto my hands.

Within minutes, a small crowd converged on the bike. Two guys (each with their entire family in tow) crouched by the wheel and yanked at the still stuck but limply dangling chain while a third sauntered over to offer up marginally-helpful criticism and advice, complete with much dramatic hand-waving. The women hovered nearby, warning their husbands not to get grease on their clothes and then pulling tissues out of their purses to deal with the inevitable mess, and five or six children clustered around the handlebars to poke at the bike’s basket and ring the bell over and over again.

Moments later, the chain was in place, the grease had been (mostly) mopped up, and the words “grazie mille” had left my mouth at least a dozen times. My rescuers continued on towards one end of the bridge; I pushed the bike back onto the road and made my way to the market as though nothing had ever gone wrong.