MeetLife Cafe and El Gringo

There's still quite a bit to say about Florence and I still have some fun facts about Siena to share, but it's Monday and it's late so I'll keep this one short.  Today was a birthday for one of the girls in our trip so we went out to a coffee house called MeetLife Cafe.  The bartender spoke really good English and most of the signs were in English which is bad news because that tends to mean you've found a tourist trap which means high prices and crappy food.  Shockingly, the food was crappy but not because it was a tourist trap but simply because this place sells coffee and liquor and that's it, except for their happy hour snack bar which consists of bread, cheese with french flag toothpicks, ham with swiss flag toothpicks, and an assortment of sauces that looked rancid.  We pounded the bread and cheese, and a few of the daring tried the ham, and the rest of us had some coffee drinks or liquor.  I stuck to a nutellino, which was essentially chocolate mousse in a glass, with whip cream, coffee flavoring, and mini chocolate balls.  It was great.  We closed the place down (at 10:30 pm).  So we went across the street to El Gringo!  The Mexican food restaurant known for their cheap tequila shots. 

Some girls from our group, neither one of which is the birthday girl, at El Gringo!

On the bright side, they had cheap margaritas, sangria, and pina coladas as well as cheap tequila.  Sadly, they were out of the margaritas, sangria, and pina coladas.  We all opted out of the tequila shot except for another guy in the group and the birthday girl.  Perhaps unsurprisingly, it wasn't good tequila for only 1.5 Euros.  We also ordered nachos with queso, which was as close to chips and queso as we could get.  Yet, somehow corn chips with mozzerella and melted velveeta on them don't quite count as nachos with queso.  The kid from the Denver-New Mexico area disapproves.  Even Donny T's in Lexington Virginia has better mexican food.  Though we are in Europe and the restaurant did have a giant mexican head in the front of the store.  Anyways, an hour or so later and we're still there debating politics, religion, and everything else one does not discuss in civil conversation.  Suddenly, the background music starts blasting authentic mexican folk songs.  Are they trying to kick us out?  But they close at 12:30?  It's only 11:50!  We will not stand for this.  We continued discussing, and eventually ended up having to shout mostly because of how high they had turned up the music but also because it was a pretty heated conversation.  So we finally threw in the towel, and said "ciao, hombre" to El Gringo, a solid 20 minutes before they were supposed to close.

And now that I've actually started writing this entry I feel like a little more prepared to talk about our cooking lesson and class today, so still short, but not as short as it could have been. Sorry...

Today I took 14 pages of notes on dairy products.  I can't even pick out any fun facts for you because after 14 pages of notes, nothing is fun anymore.  I'm pretty sure I became lactose-intolerant because of our lecture.  I guess here's what I learned:

• Sheep and goats were domesticated and milked between 8000 and 9000 BC
• Cheese was originally made by accident in the stomach of an animal while traveling from one city to another carrying milk inside it.
• Lactose-intolerance, not due to incredibly long lectures, actually decreases with prevelance the farther north your ancestors originated.  Rates in Scandinavian countries are around 2% while in Africa they're around 70%, with a gradient in between.

Today, in cooking class, we made some amazing food.  Bowtie pasta, with a bacon cream sauce, beef stew (with a wine and (shockingly) olive oil-based broth),  potato suffle, and apple pie (which really wasn't apple pie and was closer to apple cobbler).  Momeryl was getting a little sassy today, cracking jokes here and there, generally about how hungry we were and how she could count on myself and another guy to eat the left-overs.  We also had this bread with olive oil as an appetizer which was fine, except the bread was awful.  Only ingredients in the bread?  Flour, water, yeast.  Essentially this is what you would get if you had an open bag of flour that spoiled and you baked...  But with enough oil, garlic, salt and pepper it was good.  Apparently the name in Italian refers back to the ages when to test to see if the olive oil was good, men would dip the crappy bread into the olive oil and eat it, letting the oil run down the face...  We were told "you just have to forget the unpleasant effect on your breath, if you are going to enjoy this properly: semel in anno licet insanire, as "everyone can go mad at least once a year."" Though, as I've started my new diet and savings plan, I was starving.  As food and museums in Europe are insanely expensive, and as I don't want to be 300 pounds when I come back to the US, on days when we have cooking lessons, or paid dinners, I'm not buying other meals (starting tomorrow).  We'll see how that goes.  Anyways, cheers to the daily adventure.  Here are some pics to make up for me betraying your trust and giving you a long post despite my introduction.

This is a close up of the Medici house at the Boblie gardens.  The Medicis once owned pretty much everything in Florence, so nearly every museum is in one of their old buildings and based largely on their personal collection.

The view at the top of the Boblie Gardens.

another view from the Gardens.

A view from this sweet church with monks that was just down the street from our house.