So, as you may have noticed, we’ve been gone forever. Well, not exactly forever, but 41 days. How can you travel so long one might ask? Don’t you have jobs? Yes in fact, we do. Mine, more portable for sure (and I work less), but John actually has a “real” job job…the kind where he has billables, has to supervise people, interact with clients. Essentially, work. So, he does two things, he goes back and forth to Los Angeles and works every other wek (he leaves again on Sunday), but he also has to work when he’s here (because he only took two weeks of actual vacation). So when he works here, it looks like this. During the day, it’s the middle of the night in the U.S., so we can do our trips, explore, and essentially have a normal day. He starts work around 6 p.m.’ish our time, so that’s 9 a.m. your time. He works until around 2:00 a.m. our time….that’s 4 p.m. your time. It’s not really a full day, but he’ll sneak an hour in somewhere else in the day. If he wakes up by 9:30, he still gets a pretty decent sleep, and then he can still have a pretty nice full day to do whatever. It’s like living a double life.
It takes a certain “regime” mindedness to get into it (because it’s easy to sleep in past 9:30), and hard to start work at 6. We have both been trying to get on the program. I don’t stay up as late as he does because I get up earlier with the two little kids, and I make them dinner (or otherwise find food to feed them) at night. Plus last night I took a break to go have wine with my sister between 9-11. Clearly I’m having a harder time getting on the regime than John.
So that’s how the day is structured for us. We woke up late (and by “we” I mean John and the older girls) and then we rallied, Whats App’ed my sister and crew, and drove to Parma which is about an hour and twenty minutes away. We read all kinds of things about it being a great city, the birthplace of parmesan cheese (and who doesn’t love parmesan cheese??), so we figured we must see it.
We drove and left separately from my sis, so we were on slightly different time schedules. As luck would have it we are walking into town though and we see them at a café having a glass of wine and trying to feed their kids. Hard to miss big groups of loud Americans in these smaller cities, we tend to stand out. We decided to not stop and eat with them quite yet, and check out the town a bit more before siesta closed it down.
It’s nice, it’s listed as the 4th most livable city in the world. Can’t remember where that came from (but I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a crack pot publication). I can see why, there are bikers everywhere, and it looks like everyone is getting around easily, the center square is great, shopping is great (when you see a Khiel’s store, it’s always a good sign). It was a nice town. Surprisingly few parmesan cheese stores though, we thought they’d be pimping out that tourist angle more. Wasn’t expecting a big marble parmesan cheese statute in the square exactly…but somehow thought there would be something more…more…parmesan-y stuff.
We found a GREAT place for lunch, and waited 10 minutes in the scorching heat before being seated, but we knew it was going to be worth it because the menu looked awesome and ambiance was bustling and hip. The problem with that was that by the time we were actually seated people were damn hungry, a little heat stroked and things weren’t exactly smooth sailing. Our waiter spoke zero English, the menu was entirely in Italian and while it had the bones of traditional Italian, it was a little funkier than average and needed decoding.
I had a fantastic salad, Romeo had ravioli’s (Gia told him he’d hate the cheese inside so he said he wasn’t going to eat it before it even came but then ended up literally eating every last one), Lucia had salad and some pizza without cheese crispy thing, Ava “thought” she was ordering pasta with ham and parmesan, and we ordered prosecco and a prosciutto and parma plate. Gia initially said she wanted “nothing” , insert rebellious and snotty head turn, because there was “NO food” here she liked. She’s our kid that only eats about 6 things in life total.
The problems progressed. We called the waiter back because we saw on the daily specials menu that they had “pesto con cavallo”….AH, PESTO. If it’s one thing Gia will eat, it’s pesto and pasta. So the obvious next question was, what was cavallo. A big pasta? Little pasta? The funky weird shaped pasta? We asked the waiter and he said a bunch of things we didn’t understand, meanwhile I’m trying to open my google translate…and then I hear him say “raw” (which he pronouncing ‘roowwaahh” so it takes me awhile to even figure that out). Oh, ok…raw pesto…trying to figure out how exactly pesto could be raw? I’m envisioning big chunks maybe, less olive oil??….I’m all confused. Then I find my translate feature and type in cavallo. HORSE. We almost ordered pesto with RAW horse. Not just horse, but RAW horse. And for the low, low price of 8 euros. I didn’t even realize any country actually ate horse voluntarily??!!
Needless to say, we didn’t order that, but after a 5 minute back and forth hand gesturing, Italian-English fest, we got them to throw some pesto on some pasta for Gia. OK, problem one solved (which is that if Gia doesn’t eat, she turns into a monster and while I am a firm believer in natural repercussion of not eating and being hungry, the repercussions fall more on us when she turns into a monster, so I was trying to avoid that pain).
So then the food comes (before the prosecco, which is no good because we actually NEED that prosecco stat). We get half the food, and then they try and bring out a second prosciutto/parma plate, which is just basically loads of prosciutto folded neatly around a mound of parma chunks. We explain that no, no, we only ordered one, “you” made a mistake. Again, no English speakers and my three words of Italian aren’t helping. They take it away, and we wait another minute and when everyone’s comes except Ava’s we ask our waiter where her food was?? He looks confused, calls over another waiter, who tries to decode for us (her English is slightly expanded to maybe 10 words), and then next thing we know they are bringing the prosciutto/parma plate out again and putting in front of Ava.
Ava’s insisting over and over she ordered pasta. Everyone is getting frustrated…the waitress brings over the menu, and I tell Ava to point to what she ordered. She points to the anti-PASTA plate, “prosciutto and parma”. Apparently she ignored seeing the “anti” in front of the word pasta, and assumed she was ordered pasta with prosciutto and parma. Oops.
We look like big idiots, they are nice and take away the other prosciutto plate once again, and Ava asks if she can just have the same as Gia (pesto pasta). We ask feverently for the prosecco so we can hopefully now enjoy our food, relax, and take the edge off.
The food is great, we move along ok….everyone eats but Gia who claims it’s still too hot, and then after we call her out on the fact that it’s NOT in fact hot anymore, she takes a few bites says she doesn’t like that type of pesto and she’s done. Within 60 seconds she’s asking to go get gelato. So we do what parents are suppose to do, “no, you have to eat lunch first….blah blah….” I mean, the dialogue goes on and on, I won’t bore you with the details, but suffice it to say, it was a time suck. Romeo went to eat some of Gia’s pesto, she got territorial (obstensibly because now she wanted to eat it so she could get gelato), John went to grab her plate to slide some onto Romeo’s plate, she grabbed it from John, and somehow in the process of all that, the balsamic vinegar bottle (large, we aren’t talking a 4 oz size unfortunately), flies off the table and onto the ground, which luck would have, is hard stone.
You know in the movies, or in books, when rooms go silent and they say “you could hear a pin drop”?….well, that was exactly what happened. The bottle shattered, balsamic everywhere, and the big, bustling, hipster restaurant that a minute ago was super loud and festive, goes dead silent….no joke, SILENT. What’s that I hear, a pin? Everyone is staring at us like our hair is on fire.
And that folks, was lunch.
We drove back from Parma later that afternoon, and spent an hour listening to Ava complain because we didn’t buy her “back to school clothes” at the store that her and Lucia spent an hour in while we met my sister and crew and had cappuccinos. Ava had picked out two pairs of shortie shorts, a white eyelet romper and I don’t even know what else because after I saw those I shut the operation down and told her we weren’t doing back to school shopping right then. I didn’t have the stamina for the arguments.
This wasn’t a bright spot for our kids today, they were little terrors (little and big actually), and it felt like a serious gift to get back to the apartment in Bologna, into the AC, and be done with the whole day of managing complaints. Some days I feel like that is 90% of what I’m doing with the kids…managing their complaints about food, about sweets, about what they do and don’t want to do, about buying things….the list goes on. It’s exhausting. Ungrateful little buggers is what I say.
I got another gyro for dinner, and I have to say, as I looked into that mystery combo of “stuff” in my wrap, I thought to myself, I almost ordered raw horse today….I have NO IDEA what is actually in this mystery gyro (and the place looks so authentic who knows what stuff they throw in there, they probably aren’t leaving out the questionable ingredients and Americanizing it for me). It’s so darn good though, I decided to just trust the gyro and not look too closely. I’m pretty sure there is no horse in it.
This is Beverly, Romeo's dog of the day. Isn't she just the cutest? Definitely a Beverly, and I think she might have been looking at Ava and Lucia's immodest clothing with a bit of disapproval. 
Signed, ME {lv}