Nana Biography

It was a habit that was hard to break. We did the same thing in Greece that summer. You could not get out of the sun in the midday, and you stayed up till two in the morning. A pretty nice way to live in the summer.

Did you adjust that easily?

Oh, yes, we just found it, we did exactly their way, we ate their food, we did everything. The funniest experience I had was when we first moved into the apartment, after we had talked to the French lady, luckily I could cope with her, talk her into leaving her silver, and her glasses, She would not leave any sheets, and we finally got this nice apartment, it had a little garden. 

People next door heard that Americans were moving in and this absolutely hilarious man came over and all in Italian asked me please to come over and talk to his parrot. And apparently they had a parrot that spoke English, and they couldn’t understand a word it was saying and they wanted me to come, and I said, Jon said, “that’s you “. So I went over to this next place, and the woman was an opera singer, and she sat down at the piano and started to sing an aria, playing the piano, and the man danced around the room with the parrot on his shoulder, the parrot didn’t say a word. It was like a movie, you know, you wouldn’t believe it!

This was like an apartment house that you were living in?

Yes, it was an apartment house, the next apartment was across the street.

I see.

And, we were the only Americans living in the neighborhood, the only English-speaking people there.

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