Italy Part 2

I had dinner with the Italian gentleman again today. He's teaching me how to cook Italian. By that I mean, what are the cheapest ingredients which have the most flavorful impact on the meal "pasta and sauce." For example, you can make sauce and rice. You can add a can of tuna to the sauce. Or, buy a jar of vegetables like a melange of olives, artichoke heats, peppers and mushrooms in water and add them. Or, and this is my favorite, tomato sauce tastes better if you just saute it a little in olive oil first. Make sure you pour some olive oil on your pasta or rice before adding the sauce, otherwise your starch will balk at not being slathered in green fat liquid. If you run out of sauce, just buy a bag of frozen peas and saute them with some rice in olive oil, and the chicken stock that's been sitting in the fridge. Like chinees fried rice, really. If you added cheese that would be risotto, but cheese is too expensive. If your food still tastes bland, just make it a little hotter. Your stinging taste buds give the illusion of flavor. And finally, if that fails, just trade dishes with the person cooking next to you. Your taste buds will be so confused by the time they know what's happened you've started eating jam from the jar as desert.


What else... my first day or work today. It's a really exciting group. They aren't high strung, but they don't take 2 hour lunch breaks either. They're fun in the sense that while I was at lunch (on my first day) one of the guys changed my computer's desktop background as a prank. The project I'm going to be working on is really neat, I think we can do good things in a year. But more on that later.

Italian is weird, almost like chinese in the sense that it's very monosyllabic and colloquial. For example, the sentence "tu mi hai detto che te lo ha dato" means, "YOU told me that he gave it to you" emphasis on the you because in normal Italian the pronoun is only there for emphasis. Anyway its so terse and almost asian sounding. An example of this is "sono arrivato" which means "I arrived," but it sounds a lot like "domo arrigatoo," or Japanese for thanks a lot. It also has the same intonation. In other language news, I called a Swiss hotel to talk to a friend and I was doing so well in German with the receptionist until the last minute, I got by the "excuse me madame, do you have a registed guest by the name," and "may I please speak with them" and then I went to say thank you, and I said, "Bit-gratz-bonjou-allora.... danke." And then SHE said, "Oh, one moment please." Well, here are some pictures.

Here is Milano Centrale.

It is the main train station in Milan. When you walk off the train you see three story posters of Dolce & Gabbana models covering century old architecture. Very exciting.

Here is the south west entrance into Pavia.

Don't be fooled by the big roads. Most roads in Pavia look like...

...this one, right in front of my main entrance.

Ahhh graffiti, the only universal language... hey graffiti sounds Italian. Holy cow I am a jenius. "graffiti" is the masculine plural participle past of "graffire" which can me to scratch or engrave, so a single work of graffiti art is a graffito, or "ieri ho grafffito sul muro" Yesterday I did a graffiti on the wall. Yes that was productive.


This is where I eat pasta and sauce.

With an Italian man.


Look at my modern amenities.




Here is my room. It is nice.


Expertly designed to give the illusion of comfort, in a mere 20 minutes this vehicle will leave your posterior in astronomical amounts of pain.

At least that's the only possible advertisement I can imagine for this bike.