Italian Thanksgiving

So this thanksgiving turned out pretty good! I ended up cooking for about 12 people, and it was just about the perfect amount of food. Mom's recipes helped so much! Everybody loved the artichoke stuffing recipe and lots of people said that the turkey was the best they had ever eaten in their life. I can't really take that much credit for the turkey though, it is just the Italian philosophy on food that made it so good! I bought the beast at the central market here in Florence and it was just more fresh and delicious than anything you could find in the states. It had never been frozen, and I even had to pick a few feathers off myself!

Finding all the little ingredients was the biggest trick though. Luckily I had Marco to help me out, but even with him it was so hard to explain some of the things I was looking for. The entire concept of canned food seemed totally foreign to him! Canned pumpkin was absolutely out of the question, as was any sort of cranberry. People had at least heard of sweet potatoes, but nobody seemed to carry any. Other things like "sour cream" took a long time to figure out since they don't translate at all in Italian -- sour cream here is known as "Greek Yogurt." Also, you have to say goodbye to any sort of concentrate, like the mint and vanilla which the brownies call for, so unfortunately that desert was definitely out of the question.

I also was extremely lucky that everything turned out so good because I didn't have any measuring utensils -- but that is really what cooking is about I guess, just going with what feels right. I also had a lot of help from the guests here. There was a jewish woman who works as a chef in Spain who helped me make caramel from scratch for the apple pie, and also the gravy once the turkey was done. Also, just having 20 people here to consult with on cooking turkey or mashed potatoes really helped a lot. Not that many of them really knew how, but combined they all had enough good ideas to make the thing a success. So all in all, here was the menu:

15 lb Turkey (bought and cooked the same day)
Artichoke stuffing
Mashed potatoes (which Marco peeled)
F*ing good Gravy (Turkey drippings prepared by the spanish chef)
Pumpkin pie (made from some sort of fresh squash)
Salad (contributed by Tony[canadian] and Justice[from new york])
Cheese with fruit (contributed by Tony and Justice)
Sauted vegetables (contributed by Colin[from new york])
Pumpkin Pie (with help from Huey[aussie girl])
Carmel Apple Pie (With help from the spanish chef)

All this with about 22 hours of work on my part! I really appreciate what Mom goes through every year now. I never realized how much work it took took to organize a feast like this.

Also, I had to cook everything in two different buildings about 5 blocks apart, so that made things a little bit more difficult. It was really nice that everyone seemed to jump behind this idea... I mean, of course all backpackers would love to have a good home-cooked meal, but I really appreciated that everyone got excited and willing to help out to make the meal possible. In the least, it was nice to be able to share a purely American tradition with people from around the world who had been curious about it but really knew nothing of it before.

Everyone seemed to love the food though! Even the people who would never imagine eating food this way. The pumpkin pie was one of the biggest hits, and that was from a bunch of Australians and Italians who could never imagine eating pumpkin in combination with sugar. Not only that, but most of the Australians and Germans had never even eaten turkey before!

Birthday in Florence

I just had what turned out to be a really really nice birthday out here. I was honestly surprised and impressed that so many people noticed and cared. There was just such a good group of people at the hostel for that night. Every now and again you get people that all just click and for a few days, the entire hostel just feels like a massive 20 person family. We all just hung out on and drank wine on the terrace. I honestly didn't drink much myself. When a bunch of college age people get together and say "stick around, we have a surprise for your birthday," it usually ends up with somebody passed out in the corner in a puddle of vomit... especially when there are Australians involved. Luckily I escaped unscathed this year!

It actually turned out to be a really simple and sweat time. As soon as it turned midnight on Monday night everybody from the hostel got together and sang happy birthday, this girl painted me a really funny "happy 23th!" poster. These two German girls gave me a couple TINY boxes of wine and a finger puppet too, which was really funny. It really wasn't anything huge, but it all just seemed so sweet at the time.

I made up the for the light drinking last night though! Last night was actually really good too! We all went to a local pub that I like and just the people that were there were all so great. I was talking to this British girl the whole time and I absolutely love the way she talks. God they have the coolest words! Them and the Australians, I've been picking up a lot of Aussie slang since I've been out here.

I really like living here. Every time I talk to somebody from a country that I've never even thought of going to, I just feel so blessed to be living in such an interesting and diverse. The amount of different cultures that pass through here make me feel like I am living at the center of the world.

Anyways, just a random little update on recent happenings and my state of mind. Now I have to start cooking. I want all these foreign bastards to have a good experience for their first thanksgiving!

First Day of School

I am really going to like school here! I actually woke up 2 hours late today lol, and I already missed the first day travelling back from Greece, but I picked up enough Italian in the past few weeks to catch up with everyone.

The class consists of 2 hours of grammer practice, and 2 hours of conversation. I only made it to the last half an hour of grammer practice, and even that was really boring, but I genuinley enjoy the 2 hours of conversation. I can't wait until I can actually express myself there.

So this is the beginning of my 6 months in Florence. I don't know if I will have much to write about now, its hard to keep up with a travel blog when you aren't really travelling. But I'll keep in touch, and I'll let you all know if anything cool happens :D

Miss you!

Escaping Pleasure Island

For all the fun that I had on Corfu, I feel a lot like Pinocchio must have when he escaped Pleasure Island. The island of Corfu started to feel like the most hedonistic place on earth, in a bad way. It was fun, sexy, and glamorous at first, but I got a first hand look at the darker side that lifestyle leads to.

I heard plenty of stories of the female tenants being raped by the male employees. One girl was fed drinks all night by this one bartender and woke up in his bedroom and had no idea how she got there or even where his bedroom was. I am positive that the same guy drugged Sarah; I actually caught them before anything serious happened, but I was moments away from literally killing the dude. She was so damn out of it, I tried carrying her back to her room but she was completely limp in my arms. I would have had to get her over a locked fence where I found them, and it just wasn’t in the cards, so I had to sit with her for 3 hours in the cold until she woke up.

I don’t need to go into details about that story, I am just happy that my parents have taught me restraint throughout my life. Whether or not he deserved it, I don’t need a murder on my hands, and I really wouldn’t want to spend my life in a Greek prison. I am just happy that I am off the island, back in Florence, and Sarah is ok.

Greek Island

Corfu was such a good time. The island was absolutely beautiful, I hear it is the most green of the Greek Islands. I stayed at “The Pink Palace,” which was really more like a resort than a hostel. They owned pretty much the entire side of the mountain down to the Beach, and had so much stuff to do. I was so exhausted by the end of my stay there, but it was so worth it.

It took 2 days of travel to get from Rome to Corfu – first on the night train and then on the night ferry, so I was exhausted by the time I got there at 10:am Wednesday morning. I was really hoping to crash for a while, but instead I was handed a shot of Ouzo as I walked in the door and rushed onto their “Booze Cruise.” The booze cruise was so fun! It went around the island on an old converted fishing boat, and they stopped at various beaches, caves, and rocks to jump off of. I jumped off of this one 35-foot cliff bare-ass-naked for 2 free beers. The beer was only $1.50 a can, but it was all good fun. The girls get 3 free shots for going topless, so the dudes definitely get ripped off there.

After the cruise I they had a really good 3-course dinner to recover, and a dance club/bar was part of the dining room so we all partied there that night.

The next day I woke up, had a Long Island Ice Tea for breakfast and did absolutely nothing but lay on the beech.

Friday I signed up for the Quad-tour of the island that the hostel puts on. That was so much fun!!! People in Greece don’t pussy-foot it like they would in the States, and Pele and I were the only people that could actually keep up with the tour guide. He was totally impressed, since it was my first time ever touching an ATV. I have to tip my hat to Pele too for being a badass Aussie chick, she was right behind me the whole time and pulled off some pretty crazy stuff.

One guy actually rode his quad right a cliff because he couldn’t handle the trail – and I mean a serious f*ing cliff. He was caught by some small trees and brush about 20 feet down, he was really lucky that he wasn’t seriously injured.

Anyways, that was a freaking blast, and I will definitely be buying one when I get home, so that will be great if McKay ever wants to teach me how to really ride. The one I was using was automatic and kind of weak, but it was a good warm up and enough to fall in love.

Saturday night was the Toga party and another booze cruise. Sarah and I didn’t really feel like cruising to the same places a second time, and we wanted to save some energy for the party, so we rented some kayaks and went and hung out on a beach a ways off from the main tourist one. I actually was too run down to make it very long at the Toga party, and I just ended up going to bed early so that I would have energy to take a night ferry/bus to Athens, a plane from Athens to Milan, and a train from Milan to Florence, and then wake up early today to start school.

My last day was pretty fun, everyone from the hostel was hung over and we all chilled on the beach together. We dug a massive sand pit to compete with some 8-year-old German kids that were throwing sand at us. It’s amazing how much sand you can move when you have a dozen 18-25 year olds working towards the same goal. Needless to say, our sand pit put those little kids to shame.

Its been a while!

So much has happened since the last time I posted! I've honestly been having too much fun to be posting blogs! Here's the rundown, I'll try not to forget anything...

After Milan I took the train up to Rome with the intention of seeing that city and then working my way back up to Florence.

Rome was surprisingly nice! I don't know if it was just because of the contrast with Naples, but it seemed so clean, simple and organized. The first day I got in to town I went to the Coliseum and took a guided tour of it. The thing that really surprised me was how small it was. After watching Gladiator it seemed so massive, so I was pretty disappointed by that. I had heard that they had staged naval battles there because it was so big, but in reality it was too small to be very good for that, so they only did 2 battles there before moving the event to the Circus Maximus. In reality, it felt closer to a high school gymnasium than the Rose Garden.

I also went to the Vatican Museum and the Sistine Chapel -- another thing that was disappointingly small! Don't get me wrong, the artwork and the colors were spectacular, but the keyword there is "Chapel." I was expecting something like a massive cathedral/basilica, but it was actually just one room within the Vatican Museum.

The hostel I stayed at was also very small but extremely friendly. They supplied breakfast and dinner every night, and everyone was forced into a small commons area with standing room only, so it was a very social environment. Everyone went on pub-crawls every night, so that was a lot of fun exploring the city with a bunch of other drunken tourists.

During a dinner/pub crawl I met this Canadian guy named Pacey, a couple of Aussie girls (Sarah and Pele), and this Irish guy named Andy. I should say that the Irish are 100% cool so far, I don’t know what it is but I have never met an Irishman that I haven’t liked. This guy was totally Irish too, talking about how his great grandma drank 2 pints of Guinness a day for her entire life, and lived to be 105 years old.

But I digress. It turns out that Sarah and Pele were heading to Greece, but they didn’t know where. Pacey had been to this island named Corfu that he really liked and recommended going there. The Irish guy didn’t know where to go after Rome, and I was planning on just killing some time in Florence before school started.

I’m not sure how it happened but we all ended up going to Greece together. I’ll write about that in the next post so that this doesn’t get too long…

So Italian

Ha ha ha, Naples is freaking crazy. There was a MASSIVE pile of garbage outside my hostel that someone ended up burning because nobody was getting around to picking it up. Now the public transportation is on strike -- for no reason really. Someone told me that in Italy, the Unions are so powerful that they often go on strike to remind people that they can. I was talking to a person who immigrated from Palestine, he said that if you can live in Naples for a few months, you can live anywhere.

I do like it though. Naples has its problems, but there is a lot of beauty here too. The coast is beautiful, the Tyrrhenian sea is warm, and the history is amazing.

Yesterday I went to Pompeii with my friends Peter and Dianne. We missed our stop and ended up riding the bus for 2 hours longer than we would have had to. It was entertaining though. Our bus driver was messing with us, even though he barely spoke a word of English. He was trying to tell us that we had to walk back, then he changed it to "OK - €20," and then he kept trying to steal Peter's peach that he was saving for lunch. It loses something when you write about it, but it was all pretty funny. We walked around Pompeii for a few hours, it was absolutely huge. I didn't get any pictures though because my camera broke, and now I can't afford to do anything because I spent all my extra money on a new one! There is a beautiful waterfront street nearby, I am going to go go sit, read and eat gelato this afternoon.