I thought this might benefit / entertain everyone, so here we go with:
The Top Ten Things That May Surprise You About Italy
1. The food SUCKED! Friends of ours recently came back from Italy saying food was the best part of their trip. First of all, their pizza sucks hard goat teat. It is like a tortilla crust with some regular sauce and cheese and 2 pieces of pepperoni on it. Apparently they don't like toppings. Also, I ordered a steak and it was rarer than rare, in fact, they didn't even ask me how I wanted it cooked, I guess they only like their red meat red. It was ~40 dollars Canadian, huge, and tasteless. I ate about a 1/4 of it. Biggest waste of meat ever (insert witty comment here). When my parents went to the grocery store, they couldn't find orange juice, but pear juice, for sure! For breakfast in Rome, we were served toast, prepackaged dry toast. Didn't see a toaster the entire time we were there. Finally, they eat very differently than we do here. The menu has the food laid out like such: first course is pasta, second is a meat dish, and then there is sides like veggies and salad seemed to be served last. And at different restaurants, the serving sizes were so inconsistent you might end up super stuffed or barely full (and we only ever had 2 of the four courses). I would be hard pressed to find anything I would say was better than anything we eat here.
2. Italian soccer is awesome, even if you don't like soccer. I'm sure it can be interpolated to European soccer as a whole, but I've seen Italian soccer on TV and their fans are nuts, nuttier than I've ever seen anywhere else (other than the racist Spanish fans). The game we went to at the San Siro in Milan to watch Fiorentina and Inter had one of the Inter players hit in the head with a projectile coke bottle as he was about to take a corner kick. Although this was the most violence we saw, there was plenty of crowd activity to keep everybody entertained. In Turin, for del Pierro's 500th game, the opposing fans set off loud firecrackers and smoke bombs in the crowd and climbed on top of the hockey-like plexi-glass dividers that attempted to keep them separated from the rest of the home fans. In Rome, the Siena fans charged at the Lazio supporters as they exchanged projectiles launched at each other after Siena scored a late equalizer, despite the fact that security officials divided the two groups. In all cases, the fans at these games were constantly active either waving giant flags or singing or bouncing up and down (in Milan, this bouncing shook the 82,000 seat stadium). The pictures tell tales of the adventures at the games.
3. Bum Washers! In 3 of the 4 hotels we stayed in, we got a bidet tub. It looks like a sink / toilet mixture. You run some water into the basin and then sit your ass down in it and wash your asshole. Needless to say, I skipped this portion of the acculturation process.
4. Italians are slim. It was rare to see an exceptionally overweight Italian and even slightly chubby Italians were few and far between. Either this is because they do so much walking, which seemed to be the norm in places we stayed, or because their food sucks so much that they wouldn't want to eat much. I guess it wouldn't hurt that fast food was basically non existent. There was the odd McDonald's and a Burger King or two in Milan.
5. Traffic was insane. They drive like crazed maniacs. Anytime you cross the road as a pedestrian, you risk your life. They often don't drive in lanes and there are tons of scooters that will weave around anything to get to the front of lines of stopped cars. In fact, you can stand at a cross walk and no car will stop for you unless you inch your way onto the street.
6. They drive on the right hand side of the road. They drive the same way we do, I guess it is just in the UK and Australia that they are backwards.
7. There doesn't appear to be such thing as a double / queen / king sized bed. All the places we stayed in had two single beds pushed together to make a double. This often resulted in one of us sleeping in the "crack." Heather said she liked it, so apparently she is addicted to crack. Everything makes sense now.
8. Late night TV. It's all topless girls advertising for sex lines. Nearly every channel changes to this, maybe even the church channel. I might have been tempted to call if I could ever figure out their screwed up phone system.
9. Liquor. You could buy wine for 2 Euro at the supermarket (and we did!). I only tried beer once, they didn't seem to drink a whole lot of it, and it was not very good. Obviously underaged drinking is not as taboo as it is here, kids that were at the Universiade curling games on a school trip were buying and drinking beer with classmates.
10. Watch out for the tax collectors. Armed guards at all the soccer games and at the Universiade games and at any other big event had "Guardia di Finanza" written on their backs. These dudes look seriously ready to bust some ass. However, translating their Italian names from my dictionary revealed that they were "tax officers". Somehow, this doesn't sound right.
