Gastronomia

Italian food is my favorite food in the world. Which is why it is shocking to me that I am starting to crave something other than pizza, pasta and gelato! We have been eating our way through Italy in force. Every morning we have the typical Italian breakfast of cappucino (or tea, in our case) and a hard roll or chocolate croissant, standing at the bar (it costs more to sit down here). For lunch we get pizza at our favorite pizza place (they have even started throwing in free upgrades as we are their best customers) and either eat it at the bar or sitting on the steps outside. For dinner we have some sort of pasta. And of course there is a gelato or two thrown in throughout the day. We are particularly fond of Fragola (strawberry) and Stracciatella (chocolate chip).

As you can see, however, while definitely tasty, our diet has been rather devoid of vegetables, fruits, and fiber. We went in search of fruits the other day, and paid 7 euros (11 dollars approximately) for three bananas, one peach, and one apple.

Believe it or not, we even sought out the one McDonalds in Siena two nights ago in order to get some healthy food. Who would have thought--McDonalds = health food?! But they have protein and salads, both of which are sorely lacking in Italy proper. While we were there scarfing down our familiar food, we ran into our new American friend, Richie, who was also procuring health food for his lovely wife and daughter!

Last night we had more adventures in food. We met two real Italian girls who are staying at our bed and breakfast (minus breakfast). Their enthusiasm and friendliness more than made up for their broken English, and our uselessness in Italian, and we quickly bonded. They invited us out to dinner with them to a trattoria, where with their help we experienced more traditional Tuscan food. For the appetizer we had carciofi and something, which turned out to be artichokes in oil and some form of meat. For the main course, Ankur had some form of chicken, pollo arrosto. We still aren't clear about what "arrosto" means. Perhaps "in need of arrest," as it was pretty bad. I had spaghetti ala ragu--spaghetti with meat sauce. For dessert, they ordered us cantucci vin santo (pardon my spelling). We should have recognized the last part from our experience in Tuscany, but we did not. Turns out it was six rock hard biscuits to be dipped in vin santo sweet wine. We tried our best, but I ended up walking out of the restaurant with a pocket full of biscuits so as not to offend our hosts. It was definitely a unique experience, and we were happy to learn all about life for real people in Italy.

As an aside, some other things we learned from Frederica and Georgia, our Italian friends: they are not at all fond of their current government, but they are quite excited about Obama! They know a lot about the US, including about Fannie, Freddie, etc (although they were under the impression, reasonably, that the government was nationalizing all of the banks since Bank of America took over Merrill Lynch, and Bank of America sounds like the national bank). We learned about their university system (5 years usually, with opportunities for further study), that they enjoy reading Nietzsche and Marx, that they are vehemently atheist despite living in a Catholic country, that they live in a medieval town and it is no big deal, and how to say good luck in Italian (in bocco al lupo, which much be followed by creppi lupo or it becomes bad luck).

Ciao for now!