La Colazione Americana

Today (Feb 10) was a special day. I slept in until around 9:30, had a small breakfast, and read a little Mangia Prega Ama (English: Eat Pray Love). I waited for a phone call from Chirstina to go to her place for breakfast. Now, this wasn’t just any breakfast, this was an American breakfast. We planned on having pancakes, hash browns, and scrambled eggs. The only thing that would have made it more American would be a slab of ham or bacon or sausages but Christina’s a vegetarian and I don’t like pig. The phone rang around 2 p.m. and I was off. It took me about 45 minutes to get there and we didn’t start cooking for a little bit, but once we started we couldn’t be stopped. She and I made such a wonderful team. She peeled the potatoes and I shredded them while I got the pan of vegetable oil nice and hot. It took the both of us to flip the hash browns and she didn’t have any of the proper utensils so we had to use a huge spoon to do it. Everything was such a mix of giant spoons and forks and cooking too much or not enough but in the end it was just right. We didn’t have any syrup or ketchup so things were just like they would have been back home but they were just as good.


This is Christina


And this is us just after eating. Notice the hairdo.

The real reason behind the American breakfast was for Christina’s Italian boyfriend, Fabio. He had never had hash browns or pancakes and was so excited to try them. It was like watching a four-year-old boy approach a baseball for the first time. He had an idea of what it was and what it was used for but he had never used it. Same idea. Afterwards we sat on the couch watching random Italian stations in hopes that we would see something worth watching. No such luck.

I left shortly after 7p.m. and it took me about 45 minutes to get home. The sad part about how long this took was the fact that I live so close to her that I think it would have been faster for me to just walk. But that was too much to ask because it was so freezing and with my luck the bus would pull up just as I walked away and then I would be pissed for walking away. It’s a vicious cycle. When I got home, I was greeted by a pitch-black house with no power. And it wasn’t the whole building that had no power, just our flat. I called the wonderful Renato and asked him what the heck I was supposed to do and he tried to help but had no idea what I was supposed to do in that situation. He told me that he would call Tina, who was in charge of our place, and she what she said. By the time I got off the phone with him I was already in the dungeon downstairs and didn’t want to wait for him to call back to see if I was in the right place. It was so dark in this room. I flipped the switch and the lights flickered on. It was something out of a horror movie. I was waiting for the creepy guy to pop out of one of the storage rooms and tie a rope around my throat. I found the number for our flat on the main power thingy and I flipped our power back on. I turned the lights out and ran out of the dungeon back to my well lit apartment. I had just locked the door to our apartment when Renato called me back telling me what to do. He’s so precious. Very helpful man, soft on the eyes, nice, kind, funny, all around perfect guy to take home to mom. And I swear, if I had the chance I would marry him just so that I could have dual citizenship. He doesn’t seem like a bad catch so there should be no harm in that, right?