Ciao Antonio!

Nice to hear from you Antonio! I enjoyed reading your post and hope that my comments are useful.

Your description of London rain as being 'soft' is beautiful; very poetic! It's just after midnight now and it's raining in York; it's not heavy rain, just a light drizzle. It's quiet outside (most people are probably asleep!) and the rain does sound soft. My Indonesian students had a direct translation for 'drizzle' but translated 'heavy rain' as 'hard rain'. Do you use 'heavy' to describe a lot of rain in Italian? When it's raining heavily, it's common to hear English people saying 'it's pouring down', 'it's bucketing down', or even, 'it's raining cats and dogs', though maybe the last one is a bit old-fashioned now.........

I'm not surprised to hear that your Italian friends don't like foreign food. It must be hard to find tastier food than Italian. I wonder what the favourite food of anyone reading this is??? My daughter's favourite food (she's nine years old) is lasagne. Though I wonder if the lasagne we eat in York is similar in anyway to yours in Turin or Sant'Arsenio! My son's favourite food (he's eleven) is chicken satay - a kind of kebab with peanut sauce. It's very popular in Indonesia but is also sold by the supermarket nearest to my house!

You use the phrase 'are used to complain' when you talk about how Italians don't like English food. 'Used to complain' means that they often complained in the past but stopped complaining and now they don't complain. I think you mean 'always complain' or 'usually complain' meaning that they complained in the past and STILL complain now, in the present.

Where did you go when you visited London? Was there anything you saw that you particularly liked, or disliked? I'm afraid I've never been to Italy. Most of my travelling has been in Asia, not Europe. Now that I'm back in the UK, I must make sure that I take my holidays in Europe! You use the word 'holyday' to describe your trip to London. I think that 'holyday' is an older spelling of the word 'holiday', when a day off was usually to celebrate a religious festival.

Your course in cinema and media engineering sounds fascinating. I'm glad to see that one of the comments on your posting is a comment/question on films! Is your interest in films one reason for learning English? Is it possible to learn English through watching films?

The rain has stopped now. I'll quickly check the reaction to the 2-2 draw with Sweden on the BBC Sport website and then shut the computer down.

I look forward to hearing from you again tomorrow!

Ciao!

Rachel

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