Buon Appetito

The food here has definitely been one of the best parts of this whole experience. For the most part I'm eating very well, with the exception on the whole school lunch thing (more on that in a second). However, I'm about to shatter your Olive Garden loving world here. Real Italian food is fairly different than what we know it. For starters, the salad comes last , right before dessert. The meal usually goes antipasto (appetizer), pasta, entree with vegetables, salad, dessert. Those big puffy breadsticks we all know and love? Wrong! No such thing. Here they are thin and hard and usually sealed up in packaging. The package of saltine crackers that sits on your American table in a basket is a closer relative to real Italian breadsticks. So your Olive Garden unlimited salad and breadsticks meal is about as Italian as a can of Chef Boyardee. Another big fat faux-Italian lie is vegetarian lasagne. Does. Not. Exist. I took this one personally! When I said that I liked it, my host family looked at me like I suggested they make it with puppies. Here its strictly a meat dish with no vegetables other than the tomato sauce.

School lunches here are bizarre. At my camp, we mess around in the church and courtyard all day and then trek the kids over a couple of blocks to the primary school for a school lunch. The lunchroom is actually a relatively small portable building with tables that seat 6 or 7 each, each one with a table cloth, basket of bread, pot of Parmesan cheese, pitcher of water, and drinking glasses. The kids serve themselves the water. The lunch lady wheels in. This cart with a big pot of pasta in it, and shovels pasta into breakable bowls, with the teachers then serve to the kids. After the kids are done with the pasta, the teachers pick up the bowls, take them to the kitchen, and then the lady comes back with her cart with the entree pot and more clean plates. She shovels the food onto plates, which the teachers then pass out to the kids again, and then we pick up the plates when theyre done. Then we take baskets of the fruit of the day and hand them out. It's like a little bambino restaurant with the worst food ever. Usually some kind of gloppy vegetable and some sort of boiled meat. For me, they take off the meat and give me slices of gloppy mozzarella cheese. Today instead of pasta there was rice, but even that is wearing on me. I will never complain about American school lunches again.

The homemade food is great though! My friend's host family regularly has me over for dinner and they we've all sorts of fresh veggies. My host family made a giant pizza feast the other night, and it was easily the best pizza I have ever had in my whole life. I had no words for the amazingness of this pizza. Afterwards we ate f ruin that we had picked in the orchard earlier. Everyone here has a garden in their yard that they grow their own food in. It makes my tomato plants in Austin look super weak. They take a lot of pride here in growing their own food, and it's so fresh and wonderful. So overall, school lunches aside, the food is good. I'm eating lots of good stuff, lots of gelato, and lots of fresh fruit.