The high quality of Italian food

10/28/2009

Today Miles and I slept in till about 10. It was so nice to do because I was exhausted from the day before. Unfortunately, I accidentally set my alarm to go off , then my phone rang, and then Gabrielle had to come in and get a shirt so the morning was pretty happening. Sandro and Gabrielle had given us some ideas for what we could do during the day. One set plan we did have was to meet Gabrielle at 1, after his yoga class, and have lunch with him. I give Gabrielle big props. He is so active. Even in his elder years he is taking yoga, English, and bridge classes. I hope I still have the will to learn new and improve at things when I am his age.

Since we woke up on the later side and took our time getting ready, we decided to spend the morning walking down a shopping street that Sandro suggested. This street was not nearly as expensive as the high fashion one we walked down a couple of days earlier with Gabrielle, but it was still pretty pricey. It seems that other than wine, every thing is a bit more pricey in Italy compared to the US. The stores were just so, so and we weren’t coming upon any stores that had what we were looking for. We wanted to get thank you gifts for Gabrielle and Sandro for their incredible hospitality. They were so incredibly generous to us. Miles was also looking for something for his girlfriend. We decided to leave this shopping street, take the metro to the Duomo area, and try our luck there. At the Duomo, we went into a department store that carried all very nice designer brands. We ended up deciding on a very nice tie for Sandro because we figured it was nice and practical.

At 1, we went back to Gabrielle’s apartment and met him to go to lunch. We hopped in his car, which was an experience, and he took us to the local malls food court. At first I was intrigued that this was where he chose to eat, but after lunch I was pleasantly surprised. The food court had pretty much any type of food you could imagine. There was German, Sushi, Mexican, American, regular bars, coffee bars, Italian (obviously), Mediterranean, kebobs, and wild wild west. We chose to eat at an Italian place and I ordered a salad because I needed some vegetables in me. The salad came with ham, mozzarella, corn, carrots, and tomatoes. It really hit the spot. When we were telling Sandro later on about how surprised we were that the food court was so good, he told us that it has to be. With all of the good food available around Italy, if a restaurant offers poor quality or flavor food it will fail miserably.

We grabbed a quick espresso after lunch at one of the coffee bars. I am really becoming accustomed to drinking espresso. It really does the trick for quick energy. When I add a little bit of sugar, I actually enjoy the taste the taste. Plus it is extremely cheap, much cheaper than a cup of coffee and its never so hot that it burns your mouth.

We got back in Gabrielle’s car to drop it back off at his apartment so that we could take the subway back down town for our afternoon activities. We decided to spend the afternoon at a famous art museum in Milan called the Brera, but first we wanted to stop by Grom and get some gelato. I have had gelato all three days that I have been in Milan. I have also had gelato from many different places while I have been in Italy and I think that Grom is the best I have had. It is a chain, so that is good news for anyone traveling to any major city in Italy. Keep your eyes peeled for Grom because it is definitely worth it. I have been pretty surprised at the amount of Italian I can understand from my Spanish, cognates, and hand gestures. Normally, if I come across someone who doesn’t speak English, we can normally get our points across. I like to think of it as a neat, fun game.

After we got our gelato, we walked to the Brera. When we walked into the courtyard of the museum, I was pretty surprised by the scene. There were a bunch of students (must have been about college age) all gathered together around a guy playing guitar, singing Bob Marley. All of the students looked like ruffians and it was obvious that the Brera doubled as an artsy school. It cracked me up. When we went to pay for our entrance, the admission fee was much more than we expected it to be. We had seen on the map of the city we had that it only cost 5 euro to get into the museum, when it really cost 10. Gabrielle got into a fight with the people at the desk about this misadvertisement. It was entertaining to watch them speak to each other in heated Italian. In the end, we ended up paying the 10 euro, which was ok with me. I had run into this misadvertisement problem before in different cities. Another bummer was that the museum only offered student discounts to European Union students, which is pretty whack if you ask me. A student is a student.

Even though the Brera was a lot of religious art, which isn’t exactly my favorite, I still enjoyed going there. They had people restoring paintings on display, which I had never seen that process before. Im not quite sure how I feel about it because it seems like they could have quite a bit of artistic liberty with colors and shading and such and then in the end it is not the original artist’s original work. Would it be better to look a something original that had cracks and is dull? That is the question. For whatever reason, a lot of thoughts about art in general were coming to me, so I spent a lot of time writing in my brown book.

We had plans to meet up with Sandro for dinner, but we weren’t sure if we would go back to Gabrielle’s apartment in the time period after lunch and before dinner. I decided to use today as a foot tester day. Even though my sneakers have been a life saver on this trip with my cranky foot, I don’t like wearing them out at night because I think I look like a totally goober. I knew Sandro would be taking us to a decent place and so I decided I would try out walking a bit in my Sperry’s. I loosened the shoe of my bum foot up and bit and it actually did very well walking around. I was quite pleased.

After the Brera, we walked back to the Duomo and said goodbye to Gabrielle. I didn’t know that we had to say goodbye then, but he had to run. He had bridge class that night and could not join us for dinner. We walked around a bit through the glass arcades, which I think are just such a great and beautiful idea. There are so many positives to glass arcades, they are easier to keep clean because they are out of the elements, along with that the architecture is better preserved, you can create such an nice atmosphere with decorations and lighting, and lastly it is extremely convenient to go shopping in if the weather is bad. I wanted to stop by a grocery store and a bakery to get some food for the train ride tomorrow, so we thought it best to get on the metro and go to the stop where we were planning on meeting Sandro and look around for those things there.

There was a grocery and a bakery right outside Sandro’s metro stop, which allowed us to be extremely successful in our mission and gave us quite a bit of time to spare before meeting up with Sandro. We came across this little hole in the wall dive bar that we decided to get drinks in. We had been looking for a place to get drinks and all of the other bars we passed were offering extremely expensive happy hour deals. This one bar was the cheapest we had found and Miles and I are both big fans of dive bars. This particular one was also playing fantastic music (classic dance music and then BB King) and they gave us very good bar food (different types of bruscetta and potato chips) with our drinks. We were totally pumped on our find and played Rummy at the bar until it was time to meet up with Sandro.

We walked up to the metro station right as Sandro was getting off his scooter. We just started walking around his neighborhood and eventually came across a place that looked good. I don’t think Sandro had ever been there, it just looked like a good random place. We all ordered off the “plates of the day menu”. I had spinach and ricotta stuffed ravioli that was topped with a truffle cream sauce and was delicately delicious. Everyone tried what everyone else ordered and before we had out main courses, we all shared a very good antipasta platter. Like me, Sandro is also a big fan of dessert, so of course we all ggot something sweet too and tried what everyone else ordered. I ended up with an apple with ice cream deal. It was a great night with great company and conversation. Although Sandro did tell us that he does not prefer to be called Sandro (only his mother calls him that) and that he likes Alexx better. Haha, oh well, he never corrected us, and we only learned this information because it randomly came up in conversation. It makes sense that we would only know to call him Sandro because the Gornto’s started being family friends with Alexx’s mother.

After dinner, we walked around Alexx’s neighborhood to help digest. He lives in a pretty happening place with a lot of night life. There were two futball matches going on when we were walking so it was pretty quite, but Alexx said afterwards it will get really rowdy. We walked back to the metro station, where Alexx had left his bike and said our goodbye and took the Metro back to Gabrielle’s apartment, which actually took a very long time because we got delayed at a stop.

I really enjoyed meeting Alexx and Gabrielle and am so thankful and appreciate of their hospitality. I will never forget how generous these Italians were. I hope things work out so that our paths cross in the future. Gabrielle is heading to the US to meet up with Etzia around the same time that I am flying back, so maybe I will have them over for dinner to show off some cooking skills that I learned at the school and Sandro is a just a baler and comes to the US a lot. I told him that is he ever was in Virginia to let me know.