A day and a half after my last entry. Not bad but it could be better. Tonight is our last night in San Giovanni, so I'll have to take some time tonight writing about how it has been here, but not too much because I have to pack.
Picking up where I last left off, yesterday we learned how to cook some Italian dishes, which was a blast. There are about 15 of us I think, and we got together into four groups and cooked four dishes. The first course was bread salad, which is moist bread with herbs and fresh vegetables. I was less excited about the bread salad it's too much like soggy bread for my tastes. We also made a simple pasta sauce with pancetta. Pancetta is very similar to our bacon but cured differently. It has a very different flavor, very meaty. Alessio, the chef who showed us what to do, made pasta similar to linguine, but tubular and hollow, and we put the sauce on this. The main dish was stuffed zucchini. Here in Italy they have zucchini about the size of peppers that are round, and can be stuffed much like peppers. We made up a filling of zucchini, pancetta, red onion, tomatoes, garlic and celery, which was used to fill the zucchini. This was the project I was most involved in, from cutting up the vegetables to stirring the filling as it cooked to eventually filling the zucchini and putting them in the oven. The last dish was tiramisu. Now, I don't normally like tiramisu, but this was delicious. Gina, Louisa and Nicole hand made the biscotti to put in the tiramisu. They were soft and similar in flavor to poundcake, but covered in coffee and a surrounded in a creamy batter with a little chocolate on top. We washed it all down with a little Chianti classico. Delicious!
Following that, Lindsey and I went to the supermarket to get some beer. The supermarket here is called Co-op, which I think is amusing when you compare it with our co-op in Morgantown, but basically it works in a similar fashion, with membership and the like. One difference is that you must pay for your own plastic bags. Not sure how much they cost, although they are pretty nice. I had been to the store earlier in the day and learned that a boursa was a plastic bag as well as a purse, so I knew what to say in the line. Due boursa per favore.
We came back to Ferrai and Louisa's apartment and hung out there for a while. Jeff, if you're reading this, I didn't save you any beer bottles. I did have a big bottle of Warsteiner though, and something like the Italian equivalent of a 40 of malt liquor, as well as most of a 6-pack of Birra Moretti, which is sort of the Budweiser of Italy. Beer is not as popular as wine, and most Italians drink alcoholic drinks often not to excess, so most of the selection is single bottles, two-packs of large cans, and three-packs of beer bottles the size we're used to, which are basically just a six-pack of bottles chopped in half.
After a while some people went home and the rest of us went downstairs to San Lorenzo, the bar and pizzeria which we would usually frequent. In Italy a pizzeria is just a cheap restaurant, although of course pizza is on the menu. I have spent a lot of time in San Lorenzo, which we also call Gianni's, as the owner is a slightly lecherous but funny middle-aged man named Gianni. One of the waiters we got to know is named is something like Massimo, but I inadvertently called him Gianni for the longest time mistakenly. Gianni loves it when cute girls give him hugs (which in Italian translates to 'make the cuddles') and flirt with him. So since we had several cute girls in our group he kept getting us all free beer and trying to get Sarah to ride on his moped with him. We ended up staying at his bar until 5am that night, and we had a great time. Gianni got out his guitar and everyone would sing along with him, well mostly the Italians but we tried too. He tried to play songs in English that we'd know, "Redemption Song" by Bob Marley and "Hotel California," by the Eagles. That sort of thing, and the odd Italian song.
Over the course of the last 5 or 6 days I have met a number of friends here, particularly at Gianni's. One is Jack, an American from Brooklyn who has lived here the last ten months. Jack is the same age as me, and has been good to talk to, because he can tell you about all of the differences between Italy and America. Italian women, food, pools, drinking, you name it. He's a little shady, but if you take the things he says with a grain of salt, he's a good guy to know. Since he speaks English, he helps us talk to people, including his two Italian friends, one who is named Giuseppe. Giuseppe is a big guy with a broad face and dark features. He's from the South, I think maybe Sicily, and he seems like a good example of Italian guys from the South. Today at the pool, Jack observed how Giuseppe represented Italy, with his sunglasses, laying in the sun to soak up the rays, smoking a cigarette and sipping from a plastic cup of wine, and my roomate Brittany was America, who at that moment was coming back with a diet Coke (Coke Light here) and bag of chips.
Totally distinct from those guys you have Fabio and Paolo, two local politicians we have talked to. Their English is a little shakier than Jack's, but still very easy to understand and quite good. Fabio is very polite and curious about what we think. He often helped to translate what other bar patrons were saying as well. If I understand it, I think he's on the town council here, and we've run into him many times during the day also. Paolo is a friend of his, and in some ways they are like night and day. Where Paolo is boisterous and intense, Fabio is polite and quiet. Paolo is a big guy with a strong handshake and is always telling jokes. He almost always wanted to speak of politics, about Bush and America and Silvio Berlusconi, the prime minister here. I think he bored most of the girls here stiff but I enjoyed getting his take on the world. His English was excellent, and he was using similes and analogies. It must be amazing to be able to speak so fluently. There are many other characters at Gianni's, I wish I had time to talk about them all. A big group of guys, including one named Andy that we talked to for a while, are from Albania, near my grandmother's home country of Croatia. Every now and again there was a guy from Africa too.
I get the feeling I will mainly meet people who can speak good English. My Italian is not good enough to carry on much of a conversation without help. Often we talk to the friends of our English-speaking friends through them, and are able to have little conversations and occasionally one of us will say something without the help of the translator. I hope in Milan I meet some more people I can talk to.
Today was a free day. I woke around noon and went out to the piazza. It was a festival today, Saint Giovanni's Day, so many people had come to San Giovanni, which is named after the saint and was the town he lived in when he was alive. The piazza and streets were filled with little artisans and craftsmen selling antiques and handmade things. Several girls bought a ton of jewelry here, and I had a brief conversation in Italian with an old man selling old records about music. When he realized I was American he said "Yesterday!" excitedly and I was confused, but then he dug out an old Beatles record and pointed to the song. I tried to explain that I did like some Italian music but he didn't seem to know any of the names I said. I should have mentioned Giorgio Moroder! Oh well.
Courtney, Sarah and I went to the pool, where we ran into Brittany as well as Jack and his friend Giuseppe. Jack had been trying to get us to come to the pool all week but the trips always interfered. The pool in question is actually called 'Las Vegas,' and is also a pizzeria and bar. It's big, more than Olympic sized, with a very high waterslide at one end and several high dives and a climbing wall at the other end. The climbing wall was one of those kinds you see at gyms, except it jutted outward so that if you fell off you'd fall into the water. We tried to climb it but it was in some disrepair and none of us could get footholds. Italian women love their french bikinis, and it doesn't matter whether they were in shape or not, they let it all hang out, totally unself-consciously. I had a good time swimming and talking to Jack while the girls got some sun. We had lunch there, actually hot dogs and french fries, which they have along with pizza.
At 7pm we met up with everyone from our class at a bar called Bancaleone for aperitivo. Aperitivo is free finger food, a bit like happy hour, if you purchase a drink. Personally I was unimpressed with the food, and some of us decided to go eat. We found a little Pizzeria that luckily had English translations, and I got some spaghetti with tomatoes and walnuts of all things, which sounds a bit weird but is actually quite tasty, I assure you, In Italy, or at least in Tuscany, the sauce is usually pretty minimal, but either by its own virtue or of some oil in with the pasta, the sauce sticks to it very well, so that you don't need that much of it. The main meat that they eat here is pork, which I am loving. Prosciutto (sliced ham), pancetta and sausage are found in many dishes, with very little beef and almost no chicken in the options.
Following that we went to Ferrai and Louisa's a bit and made some plans. We are supposed to be meeting tomorrow at 3pm at the station to go to Milan, and then once we are there we'll take taxis to the hotel. Taxis are insanely expensive in Italy, as they charge per person and per bag of luggage as well. That and cabbies who are probably all too happy to rip off a tourist make it an unappetizing option. Plus, we will be arriving in the evening. So, some people and I talked about going earlier and lugging our bags through the subway. The problem is that we don't know exactly how to find the hotel or how to check in, but we're going to the internet cafe tomorrow to figure it all out and I'm very excited. A bunch of people want to go and I'm pretty much organizing everything, since I've been on the subway already and feel pretty confidant about it. I still have to talk to Adrian about it since she was asleep when we developed our plan. Hopefully she can tell the hotel we're coming and we'll be all good.
I went down to Gianni's a little for one last time and said goodbye to Fabio and Julia, who is an American who helps out at Il Sillabo. She helped translate for Orazio on our trips. It was kind of sad to be leaving one last time, but I'm excited to see Milan. Well, it's getting late and I need to do a bit of packing, so this will be it for now, but I'm sure it's already taken you forever to read this and if you're still reading that you're thanking me for stopping.
