Post office and Pizza

I have failed you as a blogger.  I forgot to bring my camera on our most recent excursion to a bakery.  There were SO MANY magic machines that spat forth pasta, and dough, and similar things.  I'm sorry.  Now that that's over with, on to the fun stories.  For those of you that don't know, I spent about 2.5 years working for one of the largest pizza chains in the world.  I was a cook, a server, a phone guy, a driver...pretty much every job except manager.  When Momeryl went to make pizza in our cooking class yesterday, all I could think was "I'd do this better."  Which was absolutely justified.  Certainly her dough and sauce were better, the pizza tasted better hands down, but when it comes down to technique, given the same starting materials of pre-made dough and sauce, I'd win.  I simply have experience on her.  She's made maybe 1000 pizzas in her life.  No more than 1 a week, every week of every year for the past 20 years.  I've made that many pizzas in a week.  There were nights at this pizza place when we'd top 200 orders, with an average of 2 pizzas per order.  But, upon tasting the product, I realized that my place of employment was doing it wrong because this pizza was amazing.

This morning we went into what appeared to be a tiny bakery.  We were greeted by a man who is almost certainly in the mafia and spoke no English.  He took us into the back room which turned out to be at least twice as large as the store front. There was a wall of ovens, literally 10 feet high and ten feet wide of ovens.  The next room which was also very large where they were making, of all things, pizza.  I felt an immediate kinship with the guy working there.  Granted, there was a little PTSD being in a kitchen where they were making pizza.  I swore once I left, I'd never return.  Then I swore it again and meant it the second time I left.  And here I was, half-way around the world and faced with pizza-making again. 

So we get to leave the pizza-making room and get taken through this series of hallways to yet another room where we met Uncle Johnny Stickano.  This guy was making pastries, chewing a toothpick, but was clearly called to be a comedian.  He had a captive audience.  He did some "magic" for us.  He used one of those magic machines, to get some dough, used cookie cutters to put them on a platter, then used TV network magic and pulled out a rack of already done cookies.  It was cheap humor but well-appreciated because it ended in cookies.  Even when we left his room to go to another room (seriously?  So many rooms in this tiny bakery!  More magic!) where they were making croissants, Uncle Johnny Stickano followed us and cracked jokes.  At one point he imitated shooting up heroin with his toothpick and said that most people aren't like him.  He's happy and loves his life unlike his boss (mafia guy) who is sad.  He also joked with the girl who doesn't like fat in her milk that he knew that she must have recently been to the beach because he was psychic/she had a tan.  All in all, the magic bakery was awesome.

Also, the ancient house we stayed in this weekend had a key.  I had it for the entire weekend and didn't want to leave it in my room in the tower so I put it in my pocket to put it downstairs with the other key.  Whoops...brought it home to Siena.  So we had to mail it back to the house.  Which meant that we had to figure out the Italian post office system.  SO STRESSFUL.  We had the key.  So that was good.  We didn't have an envelope so that was bad.  We found one and were about to take it when we decided we should probably clarify if we needed to pay for it, we did.  But when I went to give the woman money, she shook her head and said something in Italian.  So we tried again but with smaller denominations, she picked the 50 cent coin out of what I was holding in my hand and gave us change.  OK!  Key in envelope. Check.  Now how to mail it.  We were warned by our guide that you have to take a number.  What she didn't tell us was that you have three options of numbers.  P, E, and A.  We took one of each and decided to roll with the one that was called first.  Our E was called first but we weren't sure how to claim our spot, or which spot was ours anyways.  So we stood there, looking at all of the lines, watching as our number got replaced.  We were down to P and A.  So we looked around for the woman who took our change for the envelope.  We had to follow her around the room a little bit, but eventually we got her to stop and we held out our two tickets and our package, she took one, crumpled it up and pointed at the other.  So, we needed the P ticket, presumably for package, or priority, or something.  We had some time to kill because we were P30 and they were on P24.  We looked around for everyone else with a P ticket to make sure we weren't missing anything.  EVERYONE ELSE HAD A FORM!  We go to one of the racks of forms and grab one of each that we had seen people carrying with them.  Some had instructions in Italian, some in Italian and French, none in English.  Back to the lady.  In probably what was the best bastardization of any language, I held up the package and all the different forms and said "Per ca necessary?"  So Italian, French, and English in one sentence, but it got the point across.  Thankfully, we didn't need a form.  What we also noticed, from observing people while waiting for P30 to be called was that you RAN when they called your number.  Even this old lady, who was hunched over and probably had been for the past 30 years booked it across the room when her number was called.  So dutifully when P30 was called we ran up, pridefully showed the guy our ticket and handed him the package.  He said something in Italian, which I'm pretty sure was "normal" and I said yes, because I didn't care if he was asking me if I wanted the most expensive option because I just wanted to be done.  I was prepared to pay 40 euro just to leave, but fortunately only had to pay 1.  DONE!  We made it!  What an adventure!  After which, we promptly laughed at a group of German tourists who were breaking all sorts of rules trying to figure out how to work the Italian post office.   Anyways, sorry for the long post.  Here are some pictures to make up for it.  Cheers to the daily adventure.