Let me start by saying that before going to Italy, I LOVED Italian food.After visiting Italy, I realized what is the case with a lot of things. I love the Americanized, gourmet version of the food. When i go to Grappa in Park City, I leave thinking "That meal was amazing!"After every meal in Italy, I left thinking "that was pretty good."
My wife is a wonderful cook and i am treated to a lot of great food. I had heard that real Italian pizza was different than the American version, but i wasn't sure how i would handle that. It turns out that it is pretty good.
I don't know if part of it is because i have been spoiled by my wife's cooking, or if we were in very touristy parts of the cities so all we found was what the foreigners are looking for in the cheap pizzas and pastas.
I tried gnocchi and spaghetti and ravioli and LOTS of pizza. To be honest, the pasta wasn't anything you couldn't have gotten at the Spaghetti Factory here for $6. With the dollar being weak over there it was more like $20 a plate.
Don't get me wrong, I could have been quite happy eating nothing but that pizza and pasta for the rest of my life, but it wasn't amazing.
After every lunch and dinner, we would walk around and find a gelato shop for dessert. Now Italian gelato, on the other hand, is amazing. Much better than ice cream and better for you, or so we convinced ourselves.
Niki and Joey were in Germany for a few days before we got there and we were lucky enough to have them come down and meet us in Italy. Joey and i had some meetings for work and squeezed in some days of sightseeing between appointments.
Lucky for us that Niki was there, otherwise we would still be in the Venice airport wondering where our hotel was and how we were going to get there.
It was amazing to walk around and look at the buildings. These are the kinds of buildings that Disney pays set designers lots of money to come in and build at their amusement parks. These buildings looked this way just because they were genuinely old.
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun! Arise, fair sun, and kill the envious moon Who is already sick and pale with grief
We went and saw where Juliet lived (even though she is a fictional character). We learned that it is believed to be good luck to rub the right breast of her statue. After watching Joey, i have a feeling he is going to have A LOT better luck than the rest of us.
It was great to see some of the art that i had learned about in art history classes in real life. Those 2 x 3 inch black and white pictures in the books don't really do them justice.
The statue of David was absolutely breathtaking, but they wouldn't let me take any pictures of it. Actually, they wouldn't let you take pictures of a lot of things over there and the things that you could take pictures of were either half covered in advertising banners, or scaffolding because they were under construction, or they had cranes around them because something nearby was being renovated. I don't know how they get those beautiful postcard photos you see, because half of the cities are constantly under construction. I guess that's the trade-off for having buildings thousands of years old.
By the end of my trip, my neck was sore from looking up so often. The architecture was amazing.
I found a statue of one of the phases of the beard i left off when i recently shaved. I guess i will have to start growing again.
I would love to go back and see the Tuscany country sides when things are green and growing, but now i really want to go to Paris and see the art there. I guess in another 35 years i might make it to Europe again.
I was a little nervous about how megan was going to do without being able to play words with friends on her phone while we were gone, but she did okay. Once in a while i would catch her just getting it out and looking at it and wishing she had an international data plan, but then she would put it away and we would go and see something else amazing.
Don't get me wrong, I could have been quite happy eating nothing but that pizza and pasta for the rest of my life, but it wasn't amazing.
After every lunch and dinner, we would walk around and find a gelato shop for dessert. Now Italian gelato, on the other hand, is amazing. Much better than ice cream and better for you, or so we convinced ourselves.
Niki and Joey were in Germany for a few days before we got there and we were lucky enough to have them come down and meet us in Italy. Joey and i had some meetings for work and squeezed in some days of sightseeing between appointments.
Lucky for us that Niki was there, otherwise we would still be in the Venice airport wondering where our hotel was and how we were going to get there.
It was amazing to walk around and look at the buildings. These are the kinds of buildings that Disney pays set designers lots of money to come in and build at their amusement parks. These buildings looked this way just because they were genuinely old.
But soft! What light through yonder window breaks? 
We went and saw where Juliet lived (even though she is a fictional character). We learned that it is believed to be good luck to rub the right breast of her statue. After watching Joey, i have a feeling he is going to have A LOT better luck than the rest of us.
It was great to see some of the art that i had learned about in art history classes in real life. Those 2 x 3 inch black and white pictures in the books don't really do them justice.The statue of David was absolutely breathtaking, but they wouldn't let me take any pictures of it. Actually, they wouldn't let you take pictures of a lot of things over there and the things that you could take pictures of were either half covered in advertising banners, or scaffolding because they were under construction, or they had cranes around them because something nearby was being renovated. I don't know how they get those beautiful postcard photos you see, because half of the cities are constantly under construction. I guess that's the trade-off for having buildings thousands of years old.
By the end of my trip, my neck was sore from looking up so often. The architecture was amazing.
I found a statue of one of the phases of the beard i left off when i recently shaved. I guess i will have to start growing again.I would love to go back and see the Tuscany country sides when things are green and growing, but now i really want to go to Paris and see the art there. I guess in another 35 years i might make it to Europe again.
I was a little nervous about how megan was going to do without being able to play words with friends on her phone while we were gone, but she did okay. Once in a while i would catch her just getting it out and looking at it and wishing she had an international data plan, but then she would put it away and we would go and see something else amazing.
Saturday we went out to quail hollow then to zions where we had another headwind going out, but by the time we grabbed something to eat and turned around it had all but died.
