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.

One step back and two steps forward

I'm so physically exhausted from seeing ALL of Florence, that getting the motivation to do this blog post was very difficult and included a glass of local red wine and a cup of 1/2 fruit tea and 1/2 green tea.  Moreover, before we delve into this breath-taking experience of Florence, I'll have to step back to Siena to go over a few milestones and experiences.

This past week has flown by, but I feel like I've been here forever (but seriously, not just in the 7th grade girl way of signing year books "OMG this year has flown by, but I feel like I've known you for-eh-ver. LOLZ").  This week was the first time that I've used a clothes-line.  I did a "load" of laundry and was shocked by the size of the laundry machine.  Imagine a top hat that's been stretched into a larger circle,  or a washing machine that is about as deep as a top hat...and it was a front load. What a challenge.  Two hours later...my laundry was clean and I had to figure out a way to dry it.  We don't have a dryer and I'm assuming it's because it would consume too much energy (we were warned that if we had too many things plugged in the power would just shut off...no big deal.)  Anyways, I hunted around town for clothes pins as our well-stocked apartment didn't have any...I finally found some in the Euro store.  After only dropping one pair of underwear to the ground below, I got all of my laundry up.  A day later, it dried, oddly stiff though.  I think I'll stick to modern technology.

Another first from this week: using a bidet.  For those of you not familiar with this nifty device, it's essentially what you would get if you combined a toilet and a sink.  It's meant to give your butt and junk a mini shower.  Supposedly, it's more hygienic.  So, my interaction with this device began roughly 21 years ago when I was conceived.  By random luck, I was given and X and Y chromosome and was born a man.  As a man, I have less of a need for toilet paper than women.  Also, as a man, when I go abroad my roommate are also men and also have a decreased need for toilet paper.  So, if we are assigned an apartment without toilet paper, we may or may not have avoided buying any to this day.  One day, it turns out that I WAS in need of toilet paper and my genetic code had screwed me over.  There was not toilet paper.  There was a roll of paper towels, but I wasn't about to be the guy who clogged the toilet with paper towels.  I decided to suck it up and use the bidet.  Supposedly, you are supposed to squat above it, well that didn't work.  I slipped and ended up sitting on the rim, wondering what I did to deserve this, as the cold water assaulted me.  Once I finished cleaning, I waddled across the room to dry off.  Then, I had to wash my hands.  This just seems so inconvenient.  But, hey it's an adventure.

Class-wise, we went to tour a coffee factory.  They roast coffee beans, and barley (you can make coffee out of roasted barley...it has less caffeine (what's the point then?) and tastes kind of weird without sugar.)  This factory, was more of a warehouse in the middle of the Tuscan fields, but in a kind of sketchy way, not in the "Under the Tuscan Sun" way. We walk around back and are greeted by a man who looked like the love child (I need a new term, suggestions?) of George Clooney and Mitt Romney.  He didn't speak any English but kept making jokes and looking very proud/sly while flirting with our translator.  We called him Uncle Mario.  We were hoping to pick the most stereotypical Italian male name and I decided I wanted to be related to him, but not his brother or son.  Turns out it was Leonardo, close enough.  Anyways, Uncle Mario explained that his coffee was half robusta and half arabica and gave us all a cup from freshly roasted beans and another cup from freshly roasted barley. 

In the back is a gradient of barely roasted coffee beans to dark roasted coffee and in the front you have barely roasted barley to roasted coffee.

On the way back, we took the public bus, which was crowded.  I ended up standing in the back kind of surfing, a challenge far beyond my skill set.  The bus magically turned around a tight corner at a fast pace and I went tumbling into one of the poles that people hold onto.  Turns out, these poles aren't meant to support the entire weight of an American guy.  It broke.  I broke Italy.  Well, didn't really break so much as temporarily ruined.  It was fixable. 

Back in Siena, we decided to head out to Florence.  We had to try and figure out how to actually buy bus tickets in a foreign language.  Between our collective knowledge of French, Latin, and Spanish we did it BOOM!  An hour later we arrive near the center of Florence.  We spent the next two hours walking through Florence, through the country side of Florence, and up an ungodly amount of hills.  It was a beautiful walk with some amazing views but it was still a two hour walk with like a 40 pound backpack on. 

The river in Florence and a random bust.

That evening, we went to a palace that was plastered in beautiful art.  We went up to the top of the palace and looked out at Florence and saw everything lit up at night.  It was wild to think that centuries ago, people did the exact same thing and saw pretty much the same scene, just minus electric lights and cars and stuff.  It was also really upsetting to find out/realize that SO MUCH art/architecture was lost during WWII.  Apparently, walls were built around the highly valued pieces in Florence and around Europe (In Germany, they hid pieces in underground beer cellars.)  A special force was also created to ensure that certain pieces, like The David, weren't destroyed.  When I finally passed out in my bed, I was in heaven.  Compared to the super hard bed and shower without pressure in our apartment back in Siena, the bed I'm staying in, and the shower I'm using, were Godly.

The Duomo from the clock-tower in Florence.

Today, our feet and legs took even more of a beating and we went to see The Duomo, The Academia (the home of The David), and another art museum.  They're big on art here in Florence.  The Duomo was breath-taking from the outside and amazing on the inside. Unfortunately, we didn't go into the dome, and we only saw a portion of it, but the sheer size of the church and the dome was incredible.  The David literally caused me to just stand still for nearly 20 minutes.  His hands were awkwardly large, he was incredibly ribbed, and unlike the rest of the statues, his eyes were actually filled in.  Also, just the size of The David is crazy.  It's like two stories.  The rest of the art in The Academia and in the other art museum was pretty interesting but after roughly 5 hours of looking paintings, I began to stop appreciating things.  Points I took away:

• The Medici family was insanely wealthy.  The second art museum was in one of their houses and had multiple halls filled with statues and portraits of royals and also had frescos.  
• I dislike medieval art.
• I need to do more research about "the massacre of the innocents" so a lot of art becomes more than just dead baby jokes.
• Saint Michael is pretty cool judging by his depictions

Famous things I saw over the past few days:

• The Duomo
• The Birth of Venus
• The David

• 

  Not the real David, but smaller replica outside the clock-tower.

   
• Probably loads of other things that I didn't realize.

The view from our house.

Sorry for the long post.  There's still a lot left to talk about, but this has dragged on way too long.  Here are some pictures for making it through.  Cheers to the daily adventure.

The view from the street near our house.

Florence, from the way up to our house.

 

The Duomo.

A crappy picture of the visible part of the inside of the dome of the Duomo.

A sunset in Florence.

OH MY GOD

OK, so this is going to be a really quick blog because I have a lot to blog about but about 20 minutes to fit it in.  So instead, this one is going to focus on just how amazing this is.  I'm in an absolutely gorgeous house (pictures to come later tonight) with literally breathtaking views.  Florence, from where we are staying, looks like heaven on earth.  There's THE Duomo (dome) which is this huge church in the center of the city and you can see the dome over the rest of the town. Anyways, we arrived in Florence safely (no one got taken) and decided to walk to the property where we are staying.  What should have been a 40 minute walk, turned into two hours because we got lost so many times, it was pretty comical.  Lesson learned: If you're going down hill, you're wrong. 

We ended up walking down a private street in a gated community where each house was HUGE and had their own vineyard.  By the time we reached the end of the wrong private road, we were delirious with fatigue and kept making jokes about being taken (reference to the movie) so when the woman who was supposed to let us into the property wouldn't answer and we were being followed by an old man and were surrounded on the other side by two young men who didn't speak English, we were pretty sure that Liam was going to have to come save us.  But, then we became concerned for the woman who was supposed to let us into the house because when we finally got a hold of her phone, instead of the sweet American woman we had been speaking to, an angry Italian man started shouting...But, turns out she wasn't taken, we were just lost/calling the wrong number. 

So I'm kind of just rambling because we literally just sat down in the house where we are staying and it is obscenely opulent.  The rooms are huge and incredibly decorated with a rustic theme.  So there will be more about Florence and early today later tonight or tomorrow.

Sorry for the rushed, and chaotic post, to make it up to you, here are four pictures (that's all I could upload while I was typing this).

Coffee, Tea, Tiramisu, and Heaven

First of all, check out this link. This is where I'll be staying this weekend when I go to Florence!  AH-MAY-ZING!  So now that that is out of the way, I'll talk a bit about what we did today.  
It was an absolutely beautiful day today, which is great because it's been freezing (well, not actually but colder than I was hoping for.)   I meandered around for a while before class and found this amazing view outside the walls of Siena.

A little research on Siena finds that it's one of the oldest cities in Europe.  Not really important or populated until about 400 AD, Siena has had a checkered past of struggles of power between nobility and Christian leadership.  Multiple walls have been built around the city, the main entrance of which, looks like this:

There are so many fountains and churches in this town.  A few of the fountains look like this:

In our cooking lesson we made a pate (which was a lot better than expected for chicken liver), Gnocchi with a gorgonzola sauce, a turkey roll, and tiramisu).  So, liver and moldy cheese, not nearly as bad as imagined (actually quite enjoyable).  Tiramisu was amazing (three servings!).  And, as always, a few lessons about coffee and tea condensed from 12 pages of notes:

•  Coffee has been associated with accelerated loss of calcium from bones.
• Theoretically, green or black tea could be made from the same leaves.
• Poor quality coffee (robusta) should be darker roast to mask the poor aromas and natural flavors with those created in the roasting, while high quality coffee (arabica) should be a more mild roast to allow the natural aromas to dominate.
• Decaf was invented in 1908 in Germany
• You can't make iced tea with regular tea otherwise it becomes cloudy because the caffeine and another molecule in the tea bind and become a solid. 

Cheers to the daily adventure.

Meats, Fruits, Veggies and Holidays

OK, so it's been a pretty busy 24 hours.  It feels like forever since I last blogged.  Lessons learned since then?  Shopping in a different country is stressful.  Shopping with a woman is stressful.  Shopping with multiple women in a different country is unbearable.  There's a local grocery store about half the size of Kroger/King Soopers/Piggly Wiggly (whatever) and we all had to stock up on food for non-school-sanctioned meals and also for the progressive dinner we have in about two hours.  While shopping, I discovered that some people have very strong feelings about the percentage of fat in milk...VERY STRONG.  Unfortunately, Italian milk doesn't make it incredibly clear what percent the milk was, so it was a crap shoot, though from the amount of panicking involved, you'd think it was more similar to a game of Russian Roulette.

We had our first cooking lesson today.  The lady teaching it speaks only Italian and looks, and acts, like the love child of your mother and Meryl Streep (regardless of who your mother is, it works).  She'll be causally chatting at us in Italian for about five minutes before she stops to let the translator translate, which usually ends up being only a sentence.  I feel like we're missing something.  We made our own pasta, a local specialty known as Pici (Pee-CHee).  We also made a bread soup that was absolutely amazing, and, unlike with the pasta, when I say we I mean she.  So, SHE made an amazing bread soup, a meat stew thing that was spread over bread (it had five meats: chicken, beef, lamb, rabbit, and pork).  And, to finish the four and a half our lesson, we had a type of cookie/pastry made from essentially powdered almonds, powdered sugar, some oil (because unlike the excessive amounts of butter used in a certain someone's TV cooking show that may or may not have lead to her recent diagnosis of diabetes, we use only massive amounts of olive oil here in Italy) and orange extract.  Back to the oil point, we literally polished off an entire bottle of olive oil during this meal.  The bread soup was oil based (with beef broth added) and served with oil drizzled onto it, the bread over which the meat thing was served was soaked in oil before being baked, the pasta sauce (which supposedly was a white sauce since we didn't use tomatoes, even though they added tomato paste (for color...red, not white...crazy Italians)) was oil based.  I guess Momeryl wanted to keep the intestines well greased.

Meanwhile, the nation of Italy is celebrating the end of WWII, well more specifically the day the Allies freed the nation from fascists.  We sort of stumbled into a parade (on right, sorry about the poor quality, it was the only way to get it to upload in under an hour a better version is here), an around a major soccer game (which was an absolutely electrifying experience, even just hearing the crowd) and narrowly avoided a demonstration in the Piazza (per the contract we signed prior to our trip saying that we will not attend riots, demonstrations, or any similar conglomerations of natives).

A brief rundown of some cool facts about meat, fruits and veggies (two classes, four hours, over 100 powerpoint slides, and 20 pages of notes):

• Myoglobin, a relative of hemoglobin (the molecule responsible for oxygen transport in the blood) temporarily stores oxygen in muscle cells, giving meat its red coloring.  The greater the need for oxygen, the more myoglobin, and the redder the meat.
• Animal stress before death causes poorer quality meat, since muscle cells use their energy stores prior to death, decreasing the amount of lactic acid in the meat after death which allows microbial activity (faster spoilage) and decreases the amount of water (dryer and tougher meat).
• Butchers hang meat to counteract the effects of rigor mortis (weird to think that your food also clenches up like a dead body on CSI)
• Green beans, cucumber, corn, and tomatoes are all technically fruit despite the 1890 US Supreme court ruling that tomatoes are veggies because they are "usually served with dinner, in, with, or after soup, fish, or meat, which constitutes the principle part of the repast, and not, like fruits, served as dessert."  Shockingly, just because the government said so, doesn't make it true.  
• We think of rhubarb as a fruit though it's actually a vegetable.
• Apple juice is brownish because the enzymes released during juicing cause browning (similar to browning of an actual apple) of the liquid.
• Don't refrigerate avocados, bananas, or citrous fruits because they will stop ripening, brown, and turn spotty, respectively.
• The amount of tissue damage done when cutting an onion determines the amount of volatile sulfur compounds that are released, so use a sharper knife, and chill the onion prior to cutting it to save yourself some tears.

Sorry for such a long post. There was just so much to say!  Cheers to the daily adventure.  Here are a few pictures till next time.

Eggs and Rain

It's a rainy day here in Siena and, of course, I forgot to pack my umbrella.  So I'm now the proud new owner of a 3 Euro blue plaid umbrella.  Either way, today has been an eye opener.  Human beings are incredible at adapting, perhaps too much so.  I was walking to class and then realized that I wasn't impressed.  These millenia old buildings and amazing landscapes were just part of the common backdrop.  Granted, as soon as I realized that I was just falling into a habit, I realized how amazing this place is, but it was a scary thought that less than 24 hours in this place and I was already beginning to take it for granted.  On the flip side, I found my way back to my apartment from the Piazza without getting lost for the first time.  Anyways, as I'm actually here to take a class, I figured that I'd keep you all updated on some of the cool facts we learn about the science of cooking.  We spent two hours learning about eggs.  How they're made, how they're cooked, what forms they can take once cooked, etc.  So here goes, fun facts about eggs:

• they're older than the chicken by about a billion years, as animals were using eggs to reproduce long before the chicken evolved.
• an egg is laid blunt end first
• some farmers add marigold petals to the hen's diet to enhance the yellow color of the yolk
• USDA grading system is an approximation of the quality of the egg when it is first collected, prior to shipment and selling
• If an egg floats in water, it's rotten
• if you're making a suffle, you can open the door of the oven as long as you close it quickly and without jostling the suffle

If you have other questions about eggs, please feel free to ask, I literally have 8 pages of notes on eggs, which is condensed from around 50 or so powerpoint slides... This afternoon we'll be learning about meat, so there's that to look forward to. Cheers to the daily adventure.

Into Siena

OK, so I made it to Siena, Italy in one piece!  It's about 9 PM here and just chilling on the couch in our pretty cold apartment enjoying better internet than I've had in the past 3 years.  The past two days feel like one really long one, but isn't that the way it always is when you fly?  Back in Atlanta, a few friends and I hit up the public zoo, only to realize that zoo designers have clearly never actually visited one as a tourist.  I don't care what foliage an animal needs to survive, do not put it in front of the stupid glass pane I'm supposed to look through to see the animal.  Any kid who has played Zoo Tycoon for longer than an hour knows this, they also know that dinosaurs are real and can be zoo exhibits, but that's beside the point. 
Anyways,  I peaced out of Hotlanta for Rome, with a pretty brief stop in Chicago (everyone please look at your maps and realize that I had to fly away from Italy before I could fly to Italy, maybe there's a reason the airlines keep declaring bankruptcy...).  Anyhow, after an incredibly long flight filled with two delicious meals (well done American Airlines) and a silent animated movie about two birds that may or may not have turned into people in a parade in Rio (I was dozing in and out), I landed in beautiful Roma.  Well, technically, just outside of beautiful Roma at Airoporto Leonardo de Vinci.  A sleepy bus ride up the country side, filled with sheep, goats, and alpacas (maybe llamas, but alpaca sounds cooler) and we were in Siena.  This is Siena:

We had dinner in the plaza:

And meandered Siena for a while, doing a pretty good job at getting lost...

Last comment before I go pass out...Italians have magic cars.  Some of the tight streets they get their cars down and parking jobs that seem pretty impossible imply that their cars must come with some magic abilities.  Moreover, not a single one was scratched, thus proving that their is witchcraft in the wheels.  Cheers to the daily adventure.