Scusi, salami?

Well, Angela and I were supposed to go to the Alps last weekend, but those plans feel through early in the week. On Wednesday Angela came to me with a great idea, we drive to Pisa and Florence for the weekend. I jumped at this opportunity. So on Saturday morning we jumped in the car and began our journey to Tuscany.

We drove into Italy and we stopped at a roadside rest stop. The interesting thing about rest stops in Italy in comparison to the US is that they are fantastic. We each got a cappuccino and a panini (at 10:30 in the morning). They were both delicious. We continued down the road and stopped 2 more times for cappuccino (it's that good), when I noticed that we were approaching Genoa. Now any good carnivore knows that Genoa is world famous for salami. So we decided to stop in Genoa and buy some salami (who wouldn't). The problem that we encountered is that Genoa is a huge city with a metro area of just about 1.5 million people. It's not as if we could simply zip off the highway, find the local butcher and buy ourselves a salami.

We got off the highway and quickly realized that we had no idea where to actually buy a salami. We drove around a bit to the center of the city when Angela suggested we roll down the window and ask someone, but we encountered another problem with this idea, neither of us speak Italian. We gave some serious thought to rolling down the window and yelling at a person on the street, "SCUSI, SALAMI?" And for a second this seemed like a good idea, maybe he/she could point us to the nearest salami (I think there is a law in Genoa that says all people at all times need to know the location of all butchers and sausage makers within a 200 yard radius of them). Unfortunately, Angela didn't actually do what she said she was going to, and we continued driving. We eventually entered into a neighborhood that we most definitely a working neighborhood and we passed by a fresh vegetable, fruit and meat market. Our next goal was parking. After about 30 minutes of trying to park we found a spot and ran in an bought our kilo of salami (for those of you who don't know metric, i.e. almost everyone reading this, a kilo equates to about 2.2 pounds; yes that's right, we bought over 2 lbs of salami).

We got back in the car and continued to an area in a national park called Cinque Terre (thanks for suggesting this Catherine). This is 5 fishing villages right on the Mediterranean, and is freakin' gorgeous. Although it was raining and a little cold we had a good few hours here just seeing the beautiful Italian countryside.

There is also one more thing that needs to be said about our trip to Cinque Terre, but this must be prefaced with a disclaimer that I brain farted this entire trip. We pulled into a parking lot in the town on Montrosso al Mare which is one of the 5 villages. I walked over to the parking meter (which in most European cities is one of the ones where you park, walk over, put in your money and then put a little piece of paper in the window that says how long you've paid for). As Angela is putting on her raincoat I decide to pay for parking. I have almost no coins on me, and the machine doesn't take bills, but it sure looked like it might take cards. The key words in that sentence are "looked like" and "might." It in fact did not take cards, but this didn't stop me. I found a hole in the parking meter that my card appeared to fit in. The next conversation with Angela, still putting on her coat, went something like this.

Me: Babe, I think I did something stupid.

Angela: What?

Me: I think I lost my credit card.

Angela: What?

Me: Do you have tweezers?

Angela: What?

Luckily Angela did have tweezers and I was able to extract my credit card from the machine. CRISIS AVERTED!

When we left Cinque Terre we drove to Pisa and checked into our hotel, which was quite nice and cheap. We had a room on the fourth floor that gave us a beautiful view of the mountains in the morning. We woke up early and went and took pictures of the tower, did some shopping (yes Angela bought a lamp shaped like the tower). We then got in the car and decided to drive down to Livorno for some lunch and over to Florence for two nights. We needed to get some gas, however. At this point I want to say two things, the part of the story cannot get back to Susan just yet (I'm looking at you Betsy) and we were driving Susan's diesel Mercedes-Benz A-class. If you read that last sentence and you think you put together what happened next, congratulations, you're a freakin' genius. We pulled over to a gas station and I started pumping gas. I want to point out that I was brain farting this entire trip. Although I kept reminding myself it was diesel my thought process went something like this;

"You can't pump diesel into a regular engine because the nozzle is too large, therefore the regular pump probably won't fit into a diesel gas tank."

I should have just thought back to when I learned basic shapes. A 2 inch circle can't fit into a 1 inch hole, but a 1 inch circle can fit into a 2 inch hole. I proved this logic correct when I pumped 8 liters of Super into a diesel engine. The ensuing conversation with Angela went like this:

Me: Babe, I did something stupid.

Angela: What?

Me: I accidentally pumped Super into the car.

Angela: What? How much?

Me: Just about 2 gallons.

Angela: What?

Me: Can you look in the manual to see what we should do?

Angela pulled out the manual, I'm guessing looking under the tab of "my fiance is a moron who put Super into a diesel engine, what should I do?" When she did this a ran into the gas station and asked the attendant in a panic, "Do you speak English?" His response was "a little." I said to him, "I accidentally put Super into my diesel car?" He looked down at his computer and said, "8 liter, fill diesel, fill diesel." There was another mechanic standing nearby. I looked at him for affirmation. He threw up his hands and said in a very nonchalant manner, "Fill diesel, fill diesel." I said, "Okay," and left to fill diesel. The attendant thinking that I must be some sort of functioning idiot came out to fill diesel for me. I got back in the car, closed my eyes and started the engine. The good news is that nothing bad happened to the car and there is no longer any Super in the gas tank, the bad news is that Angela and I still need to tell Susan about this incident.

The rest of the trip was relatively pain free. We stayed in very nice bed and breakfast in Florence called Althea Rooms, ate possibly the best meal of our lives at Osteria Santo Spirito and had a great time. On the way back we stopped in Parma and bought a kilo of Parmaggiano-Reggiano and 2 kilos of prosciutto di Parmia, which we just dug into and is delicious. All in all it was a memorable and awesome trip.