Lasciare fare a Dio

So it's not even 11pm here yet and I'm already in bed... yup, clearly I'm not feeling well. :( My throat is really hurting me, along with my entire neck region. And my head, every time I change positions. And I generally feel lethargic and sickly. Will probably go to a pharmacy tomorrow to see what they can give me. Hopefully I'll be well enough to go to Napoli with Luciana in a couple days!

I'm writing this post as I take a break from working on my Living Language Journals. They're one of the assignments we do for this program and we do 9 of the 12 here in Vasto, with the first 3 due this Friday. For these three we're working with the Vasto students that are doing theater with us; there are 6 of them and 12 of us so it works out evenly for discussion groups with 3 people each, but we all met today for lunch and for the most part ended up talking as a big group, which was great and really interesting. Oh, and by the way, we all came back to the meeting with our homemade panini... the Italian kids came back with McDonalds. Go figure :P

The subject of the first journal is the presence of dialects in Italy, and in Vasto in particular (YAY!). The vastesi students told us that only their grandparents really speak in dialect, and that many of theirs only went to school for two or three years and don't actually know standard Italian so they prefer to speak in dialect. Their parents don't really know it though, and use it only to speak to their own parents, and they themselves use it very rarely, and mostly just when joking around amongst themselves. When we asked them to tell us about the dialect, they described it as "vecchio" - "old" :( This makes me suuuper sad because it kinda seems like the dialect is a dying art. :( Apparently in Naples there's like a law that the dialect has to be protected. I hope a lot of other regions follow suit and really appreciate the beauty of their own dialects and take measures to protect and promote pride in them. :)

And as a closing note, the title of this post? The standard Italian for the title of yesterday's post. Yup, 'Ssa fa' dde' = 'Lasciare fare a Dio." Dialects FTW! 

Lasciare fare a Dio (leave it to God :)!),
Michelina