hi, all! back from our 2-week trip & had to share a humorous story related to the "allergy" card tip. I used Babelfish to translate english text about my wife's nut/legume/shellfish allergies into Italian, but I should've tried translating it back into english... somehow, "nuts" was translated as "dadi" instead of "noci" - and the kind waiter in Vernazza finally corrected us. The previous restaurants were carefully cooking around her allergy to DICE, and possibly unaware of her potential reaction to nuts. Ouch!

I only know "dadi" as meaning dice, so I just looked it up in my dictionary, and apparently it also means the hardware kind of nuts, as in nuts and bolts. Ya learn something new every day...

I wouldn't mess with amateur translations for anything this important. There's too much at stake. Or steak.

<b>http://www.selectwisely.com</b>

Robespierre - thank you for that post! and my story is only a humorous postscript because we skated through a potential minefield with my wife's allergies without incident. The pictures on those cards are brilliant.