Hello, everyone! As most of you probably know if you've read this blog before, I am currently smack in the middle of spring break. Over this ten-day vacation, my friends and I are visiting Venice, Florence, and Paris. Having done Venice early in the weekend and Florence for the past few days, today is our final day before heading to la France. As it happens, today is also my twenty-first birthday. I guess you could say things are pretty good.
It is from this place of pretty-good-ness that I bring you the first installment of my spring break blogging. There's a lot of ground to cover regarding our trip so far, so settle in with your computers, I'll settle in to my chair on our terrace watching the sun begin to set over the bell tower, and we'll get started.
My trip began on Friday morning with a solo flight to Venice. Thus was slightly terrifying, but thanks to the always-comforting efforts of Ryanair, the happy discovery of a group of London Program guys on my flight, and copious amounts of Justin Timberlake music, I survived. Our time in Venice was short - just over 24 hours in my case - but filled with excellent things...most of them food-related. I had a surprisingly delicious broccoli pasta Friday night (happy meatless Friday!) at a restaurant where the menus were handwritten each day in Italian and the rest of the clientele was about 4/5ths Italian men named Benito and Giovanni aged 70 and above. On Saturday, we got pasta in takeout boxes - I'm talking straight China Lane here, people - at a somewhat more touristy but no less awesome little place called Alfredo's. My "cinque fromaggio" gnocchi was, you know, a couple notches better than 4-cheese pasta at the dining hall - a rating I give quite literally, as I think 4CP is closer to God than anything on campus short of Fr. Hesburgh himself - but the main thing I took away from this restaurant was the music. Authentic Italian crooning, you ask? Jazzy instrumentals? No. When we first got in line, they were playing "Dirrrty" by Christina Aguilera. This was followed up by, in no particular order, Pink, Gnarls Barkley, post-Y2K Madonna, and, I kid you not, Eiffel 65. Terrible American pop music is, indeed the universal language.
To follow this meal up, we grabbed our second gelato of the trip. I paired a strawberry flavor that looked promising with something whose name I could not translate but which had large dollops of chocolate scattered throughout that I felt couldn't fail to please. When I took my first bite, I realized just how accurate that evaluation was. Friends, this gelato tasted exactly like a cup of chocolate ice cream from Sycamore. If you don't know what Sycamore is, I am sorry for your loss. It is a frozen custard stand in Logansport, open only seasonally, that serves up the best frozen goodies east of the Mississippi. And this gelato tasted just like it. I cannot adequately describe the joy I felt in consuming this gelato, but I can approach it by sharing the following fact: the dollops of chocolate scattered through the gelato? Yeah...those were Nutella.
We headed to Florence by train on Saturday night, and our time here has continued the trend of life-changing nomz. On Saturday night, I had ricotta-spinach ravioli and a "small cake" of chocolate and pairs to which I remain fondly attached to this very day. Sunday brought with it a focaccia-bread sandwich the size of a basketball, which convinced me that I will in fact starve upon my return to London and my subsequent refusal to eat the peanut butter and Tesco bread monstrosities I call "sandwiches" ever again. For dinner, I had a lasagna that might just keep me away from the pasta line at SDH for the rest of my life. Oh, and throughout each of these days, you can just assume with total accuracy that gelato is a near-constant.
Yesterday, in the only proper manner for the eve of my twenty-first birthday, the gastronomical focus of the day was more balanced between food and wine. After a quick lunch (and gelato) near the leather markets where I had spent the morning buying a purse from an Italian woman in negotiations performed entirely in the only language we both spoke, French, a few members of my group and I headed out on a bus tour of the Chianti wine region. The bulk of this tour was spent at an ancient castle turned modern vineyard for a tour, wine tasting, and what I like to call "classy snacktime." I'm largely indifferent at best towards wine that isn't white/pink and sparkly, but I was surprised to find that the fairly intense reds we were tasting were nowhere near as disgusting as I expected them to be. The snacks, however - a sheep cheese, Italian salami, bruschetta with painfully expensive olive oil, biscotti, and the highlight, cheese-salami-bruschetta crostinis - were 100% on point. Nom.
After dinner last night, we had to figure out what, if anything, we wanted to do by way of going out for my birthday. Our hip young tour guide for the day, Irene (a name that sounds much cooler in Italian than in English), gave us recommendations for a few clubs, but as most sounded far out of my price range and one had a most recent review on Trip Advisor entitled "SEXUAL ASSAULT," I was more than happy to just enjoy my dinner with an extra glass of wine of my choosing and to call it a night. As we were leaving the restaurant, though, we happened by total chance upon a group of Notre Dame guys from the London and Oxford programs. They were headed, funnily enough, to one of the clubs Irene had suggested (not the sexual assault one, to our delight). They were also already fairly intoxicated and, thus, very enthusiastic about us all going out. I figured if everyone was so excited about it, I could manage a short time at a club for my 21st. We headed back to our apartment - yes, apartment; the post regarding our insane accommodations on this trip will come later - to change, and we heard from the guys that the intended club was apparently closed on Mondays. We found a much tamer bar to replace the closed club and headed over there. After some initial mishaps involving mismatched drinks and some surprise €7 charges for the boys, the night actually turned out to be really entertaining and fun. As I mentioned,the guys were pretty hammered - hence the "entertaining" - and, to my great and pleasant surprise, the least intoxicated of the bunch even picked up the tab for my very first legal-in-all-countries drink. After two months living in the UK, I may not have had the fun of walking into a bar for the very first time as a newly-minted legal drinker that would normally accompany a 21st birthday, but celebrating in an English pub in Florence, Italy, full exclusively of American college students (the only people out on a Monday night) wasn't half bad.
Anyway, after an afternoon filled with viewing Botticellis at the Uffizi and blogging on terraces, I'm off to get ready for the repeat visit to the small-cake ricotta ravioli place that will serve as my birthday dinner. Check out Instagram for a small preview of spring break photos, and look forward to more blog posts and photo albums once we're in and back from Paris. Ciao, everyone! It's time for more gelato.
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