Lagging from a jet.

It took me almost 2 weeks to get on European time and now Im going to suffer to try to get to American time. It seems like American time just sucks so much more. I feel like I'm turning into that pompous guy I briefly dated when Dom and I were on what I thought was permanent hiatus. Don't get me wrong, he's a nice guy and all that jazz, but I reallllllllly do not deal with with someone who thinks they're always right. The only person who can be right all the time is me, but solely because I have a vagina. Not because I'm smart or anything, just because I possess a vagina. I can continue on with the reasons of why said guy was not good for me, but then it would take away the beauty of my post. So I'm turning into him in the sense of that I've been bitten by the travel bug. Europe. Europe. Europe. blah. blah. blah. blah. I guess the only difference between me and him is that I am posting it on the interwebz on my own private blog rather than being a bitch and shoving it up everyone's nose. Okay, maybe a little bit about the JAMON DE PATA NEGRA but with good reason.
That reason is that Jamon de pata negra (Iberico ham) was illegal in the US until 2005. It is now available in very limited quantities and very difficult to find. It is still illegal to import ANY kind of meat from ANYWHERE into this country without proper packaging and Dept. of Agriculture approval. Well, my cousins in Spain kept shoving chorizo and jamon de pata negra down my throat at every given opportunity which means I had to eat like, the whole time I was in Spain. I am surprised I could fit on the airplane.
Anyway, so my cousin sent me home with said jamon de pata negra, carefully packaged of course. I will admit that the whole time while going through customs I was a nervous wreck about getting caught and getting a $2500 fine, but it turns out people in Miami are lazy fags (literally, butt fucking fags that are possibly too lazy to butt fuck) and the beagles in the airport are just as fucking lazy because I not only got away with meat by the beagle that sniffed my luggage, but also by the people who are supposed to go through my luggage and make sure I'm not doing anything illegal. Next time I know I don't need to shove cocaine up my ass. So, I made it home with JAMON DE PATA NEGRA that my wonderful family gave me. Well, as it turns out, this shit sells for $96 dollars a pound. Yes, you read that correctly. $96.00 a pound. Which means that a whole jamon goes upwards $2000 and higher. What it also means that I have meat that you will not be eating because I am a spoiled bitch and I am going to eat it all and not share. What's also awesome is that because I have family in Spain that loves me, they're going to spend 200 Euro's and buy me a whole jamon de pata negra and switch the labels on it put a Serrano jamon label on it which is legal for export to the US by butcher shops. In exchange, I will be sending them Levi's 501's because apparently Levi's makes their money in Europe, because they charge 150 Euro per pair of jeans which I find completely insane.

This weekend I plan on opening up my notebook that I wrote in while eating everything I could, going through my notes and creating recipes on what I've eaten and how I can make these dishes in my own signature way. I've been inspired beyond belief and while I still have the tastes and feeling of yum in my head it's time to be creative and make other people fat while in the process of being creative. I've already given up on the fact that I will never, ever surpass Pizzaria Rustica in Lecco, Italy because they won second place in the world pizza finals. They must put crack in their pizza dough because their shit was addicting. It was the only place I ate at twice in my week in Italy. My second time was in the morning when the owner had all the fresh focaccia bread out... And of course it was pizza and focaccia heaven. I made friends with the owner and I told him I would write a review for him on FOODSPANK (please see my links for the blog) which I will do this weekend. Seriously, I want to work for him for a month for free to steal his techniques. I already told him that though so if he reads this, he won't be surprised that I am crazy that I want to work for him. He already thinks I'm crazy for wanting to move to Italy. But now I retract that statement and I want to move to Spain and if I have my way I will become a dual citizen of the US and Spain and buy a piece of land there and build on it as the years go by, then I will retire in Spain and live out the rest of my life eating jamon de pata negra. I might even be asked to be cremated with one.
Surprisingly, the thing that drove me the up the fucking wall in the best way ever were the fucking olives. Yes, you heard me, the fucking olives. I don't know what we're doing wrong here but US as a whole needs help when it comes to curing olives or finding good ones to import. The most insane olives I ate were from this Bristol Farms-like market just outside of Lecco, before driving into town, but a close second were the olives at Da Scapin in Verona, Italy. Unfortunately they didn't speak any English and I know enough Italian to just barely get by, so unfortunately I couldn't ask them questions about the curing process or where they get it or whatever, but those were also mind blowing. If I were to spend my time typing about the food and food alone, I will probably not sleep for 2 weeks straight because I could easily write a novel for each and every single thing that I ate.

Unfortunately I will need to sit tight until summer to experience the food orgasm that is Spain again. The food in London was both fabulous and terrible, the food in Italy was mind-blowing and the day I spent in St. Moritz, Switzerland I got to try a local meat only made in the area and this AMAZING barley soup with bits of speck but you know, Spain trumped all that is food heaven. So, I will bitch and whine until I get to spend a month in Spain (and Portugal and possibly Morocco) this summer. I should probably not attempt Morocco in summer because it'll be 1298731928731928471924719248712987 degrees but whatever. I am easily swayed by the thought of delicious Moroccan food.

Clearly, I am a fat person and I'll embrace that fact. Thank you.

And what is this?

To continue where I left off, I would have to go back to Friday, February 27th. Since it’s now Sunday, March 1st and I’m on the plane to Italy, I might as well just write one long blog since I need to keep myself occupato before I land in Milan. I’m currently on an Airbus 321 via Alitalia and although I’m more of a Boeing girl, the ride has been very smooth and Alitalia did a great job installing very comfortable seats in economy. I probably wouldn’t have complained that much about the seats in AA’s 777 if the seats leaned as far back as these do. Actually, the seats lean so far back that I moved my seat forward a bit to type more comfortably. Alitalia’s blood orange juice is the best I’ve ever had that wasn’t fresh squeezed and their pound cake is so moist and delicious that I almost cried thinking plane food could be that good. I’m reminded that I’ve been eating like a fatso this entire trip which under normal circumstances that would mean I’ve been gaining weight like crazy but because my legs feel like j-e-l-l-o (it’s alive) I guess that means I’ve burned some calories. I even said to Dom this morning in our hotel room how thin I look considering I’ve been eating nothing but shit.

Let me just say that traveling with my family and Dom has been nothing but comedy and chaos. My mom and dad are seriously something else. My mom complains at everything in the world and she asks the stupidest questions known to man… Or when she’s arguing with my dad and calling him a stupid man. My dad’s a total block head and I swear his brain is made of rocks. I know I’ve called him brilliant before in past blogs but I may just take it all back now.

I am considering writing a script – the next blockbuster hit will be “Traveling with the Motta’s + 1 Cognata.” I think if produced into a movie, this London trip would have had everyone on the floor pissing on themselves. I know I covered the room in my previous blog, but I have failed to mention everything else. We had a bunk bed in the shit room – which my dad INSISTED on being on the top bunk and my mom on the bottom. Dom and I got the large bed – not because we are fatsos, but because my dad is a hairy, dirty, shitting, scruffy, giggling beast that my mom wants to kill on a daily basis and she cannot sleep with him for the life of it because of said hair, dirt, shit, scruff and giggles. So my mom’s on the bottom bunk bed bitching about the room and her life and blah blah blah and my dad purposely leans over towards the wall where he knows the bunk bed will turn a bit and freak my mom out. So, he did. She turned white as a ghost, her hair stood straight up and I think her eyes temporarily turned to the back of her head. She was screaming something about her dying and breaking her neck and how unsafe everything is and blah blah. So she fly like a flying squirrel to our bed screaming at how horrible my father is and how she was going to kill him if he got down. Dom decided to join in on the fun and jump on top of the bunk with my dad and jump up and down like a monkey to make my mom nervous. Of course anything that involves Dom getting hurt freaks me out because half of the reason I’m with Dom is because he’s incredibly good looking and if he breaks his face or loses a limb I’m not sure how much I will love him anymore. I mean sure I’ll love him but I’ll have to have a good looking boyfriend on the side or something. Then Dom and I get stuck with the bottom bunk because my mom wanted the big bed so I kicked my dad off of the top bunk although Dom didn’t care so I slept on this uncomfortable cot-like bunk for the rest of the night. It was horrible, uncomfortable, the room smelled like caca and yeah, that’s about it.

Thankfully we didn’t spend a lot of time in our room. We did, however, spend a lot of time in Colin’s cab. No, not a cab company – but actually a guy named Colin who was our cabbie. He picked us up from the Paddington Station and we took his number and called the guy for EVERYTHING. He was actually the coolest cabby ever and since I’m hoping to be in London again in August, I’ll be calling him to pick my ass up from Heathrow. We did the touristy things – we saw Big Ben, toured the Tower of London and played with weapons, saw the Crown Jewels, walked around St. Katherine’s Docks, walked around Westminster Abbey, but we didn’t go in since they wanted to charge 800 million quid to get in, walked up and down the Thames River, went to the Imperial War Museum where I think both my dad and Dom died a little bit and they had just WAY too much fun, went to Harrod’s and bought some stuff, spent a couple of hours walking Windsor castle and the town, ate both good food and shitty food and over-all had a shit ton of fun.

One thing that kept us all laughing were our accents. Apparently it’s impossible to speak to people with accents without picking up on theirs. I spent a majority of my time pinching my mom to stop picking up on their accents because not only did she sound like an idiot, but she elongated everything so she sounded like a retarded English boy because somehow her voice got deeper. She also does this weird thing with her mouth when she makes these accents that it looks like she just sucked on a lemon or thirty. I mean, really – that can’t be comfortable and it’s so unnatural I don’t know how she doesn’t notice she’s doing it. Then when I pinch her she gets pissed off and tells me that she’s not copying the accent and yells at me in Spanish… With an English accent. I’m not sure how she accomplishes that but she does.

Let me just say that fish & chips suck in London. The one thing I wanted to eat more than anything was fish & chips. Somehow – someway, we went to the gay pub and had fish & chips. Those sucked. When we moved to the new hotel, we then went to the Paddington Fish & Chip Shoppe that Colin recommended as being “one of the better ones” and it sucked a fat donkey dick. They didn’t even fry the fish fresh and it was sitting there in a warmer tray. I also do not like that the skin was on and I felt like a dog chewing a rubber toy. There was no point to having the skin on because the meat would just fall off of the skin anyway, so you missed half the batter since it was stuck to the skin anyway. For fuck’s sake, that’s all I wanted… Just some damn good fish & chips. I wasn’t going to tell Colin that he has dog shit for a palate but that’s what it was. Lucky for me, I love all forms of potato + deep fried so I had a shitton of chips, even with breakfast. The chips were served differently everywhere I had them so I guess I’m not sure what’s traditional for chips but hey, they’re fucking fries. Can’t fuck those up too much, right? One thing I did notice was that the chips were significantly sweeter than anything I’ve ever had back home. They were slightly sweet potato like and I wish I could get them like that in the states. Combined with extra fine ground salt, they were heavenly.

For our last night in London, we moved to the Cardiff Hotel at Suffolk Square which was adorable. The buildings were probably 200 years old and everything was made for skinny midgets but lucky for me, I am not a total fatso and I am a midget. My parents got a triple room and Dom and I got a single since that’s all that was available but we were happy as Hell to no longer be at that horrible Kensington ‘hotel’ aka the torture chamber and no longer sharing a room with my parents. It’s not that sharing a room with them is difficult, it’s just that my dad snores louder than 20 bears sleeping in a cave. It makes trying to sleep impossible and there is no such thing as deep sleep. The only thing that was horrible about our hotel was that it didn’t have a lift. Not only did it not have a lift, but we were 981274912874912874198274987 floors at the top since those were the only singles with private bathrooms. It seemed as though the higher we got, the more narrow the stairs were. At one point I thought I was going to fall down an entire flight of stairs. You know, I have small feet… But apparently people in London have smaller feet because my foot barely fit on the steps and there was no guard rail, followed by a 20 foot drop to the previous floor. I am very thankful I didn’t die. This is why we left our luggage with my parents in their room. Dom and I were so exhausted that we both fell asleep around 8:00 pm and slept so soundly that we woke up at 3:30 am thinking it was almost 7 am and that we had missed our flight to Milano. It’s amazing what a combination of lack of good sleep and jetlag can do to a person.

I guess the most hilarious thing of all was in Heathrow airport, outbound to Milano. My Mom and I got separated from Dom and my Dad because we had to pull over to the side and go through our bags and fill a baggie they gave us with anything that was gel or liquid. We were going through security and my bag beeped like crazy so they pulled my bag to the side and strip searched it. I guess I had a bottle of water in there that I was unaware of. Suddenly Dom came running over to us laughing his ass off but looking semi worried and he’s like “OH MAN, YOU KNOW THAT KNIFE YOUR DAD THOUGHT HE LOST? WELL, SECURITY FOUND IT!” My poor dad put his pocketknife that he thought he lost in the hotel room in his fucking computer case, which was his carry on. Oh yes, oh yes, you can imagine they pulled him to the side, called the cops on him, detained him and gave him a good grilling. Since we weren’t allowed in the security area, we saw a woman with a box full of rubber gloves walking into a room and we all died from laughter thinking they gave him a full cavity search. After about half an hour they let him go and it’s too bad because they didn’t cavity search him. That would have probably completed the end of the London trip if they did but all that happened is they took away his pocket knife and put him on “the list.” He will forever be on a list with terrorists.