So after Paris we set sail for Italy. We took an overnight train down through France and we found out that Italian Trains are wonderfully imaginative on how to waste time. We stopped off in Switzerland for an hour and a half for no apparent reason. In fact, anyone who has ever been to Italy will be aware of the wonderful time-keeping ability of the Italian train people. So we finally landed in Milan 3 and a half hours late, just brilliant really that we turned up in the right country and not Narnia to be honest.
Most of this will be written by John with my help, but I just have to interject that when we were taking the train from Milan to Parma, John looked at me and said with wide, hopeful eyes, "I hope my Italian mammy is going to feed me!" At which point I laughed but remained silent, realizing John had no idea what he was in for...
Parma is a beautiful, quaint little city, full of medieval churches, more churches, and some more churches; you know, for good measure. It was great to be out of France for the start of the world cup...lovely as they may be... Henry we're still waiting for you to come to Ireland.
As had been predicted on the train, mammy Italia was quick to feed us, more importantly me, and feed me and feed me. :D :D Unfortunately, I had no idea about courses. I ate like a horse for what I thought was our entire meal, only to realize that second course had yet to be served. However, mammy Italia's eyes lit up when she realized that I would eat more than originally expected and for the remainder of the stay she would continue to offer me a hopeful second helping of whatever she was serving.
Francesca was kind enough to take us to a party outdoors. And I mean OUT doors. It was basically a pub and club in the middle of a field, very strange at first but turned out to be a good night, met a load of her friends and even the twins-two of the lads were so fashionable that they wore the same shirt, i mean jez lads don't ye consult one another on what ye are wearing before you go out amatuer mistake.
Probably the other greatest thing about Italy is homemade Gelato, imagine the greatest Ben&Jerry's(HB) ice cream you've ever had, well good Gelato knocks its socks off.
Now everywhere we seem to go one or two funny incidents seem to happen, the trip to Parma was no exception.
The first mishap was when we went to post postcards to Ireland and America, silly us, we thought the must efficient place to do this was the Post Office, but by god were we wrong. We took a ticket and waited in line for about 10 minutes for our number to be called. When it was called we went up the the woman, real pleasant looking thing she was too, with an actual Italian speaker in Francesca thinking that this may break down the whole language barrier that happened every so often. We told the lady where we wanted to send the postcards. She informed us that we needed stamps to post them, no problem right!? we are afterall in a Post Office, no there was a problem. Apparently that woman doesn't sell stamps that's another person's job, here was my thinking that the Irish can be somewhat inefficient but the Italians have someone who's sole purpose of their job is to sell stamps and only sell stamps. So we took another ticket, got in line and waited for Little Miss Sunshine 2. When we got to her, in fairness, she did her job description prefectly and gave us some wonderful stamps but then informed us we had to get back into line to post a bigger package, which was a tshirt, because apparently that was someone else's job. We lined up for another woman to weigh it and give us another fucking stamp for it but to send it, guess what we had to do, get in another line. In total it took us 45 minutes to send 2 postcards and a tshirt. Watch out the Irish government these Italian Post Office workers may pass you guys out on efficiency.
There also was a biddy case happening while we were waiting. This poor old lady came out to set up her booth to ease the line of people waiting to be redirected to another booth but it her "mad rush" to help out she misplaced her glasses. God bless her, she was convinced for a good 2 minutes that they must of been locked in her money box but opened it to find nothing, she then asked the other alert and agile young minds of the Post Office had they seen them. The sad fact was that this went on for 15 minutes and numerous trips to the back office to search for the missing glsses only to realise that they were on her, I don't mean they were in her hair, I mean she was wearing them on her nose.
The other fantastic event happened when we went out for pizza one night with Francesca. When we got to the place we asked a guy for a table and he just seemed to wander off back into the back kitchen. After waiting 5 minutes for this kid, about our age, to return we just asked someone to seat us. This was an excellent choose as it turns out, why? because the first kid was an idiot,a complete and utter fecking eejit. He had this constant dazzed and confused look on his face like a deer caught in the headlights but he'd an IQ seemingly matching a deer just hit by the headlights. Most restaurants have themselves split up into areas that each waiter and only he covers. Clearly nobody had informed this kid of this system as he went for table to table,area to area cleaning off one table then going over to another one and asking if they had ordered even they already had their food in front of them. At times he came out with trays of food and just went from table to table asking who ordered what, no sure where to dump them. But he's moment came to shine, this group of 3 girls his age came into the pizzaeria about a minute after us and he made a beeline to seat them and look after them for the night. He took their orders, I think, and dropped off their Coke's, the only thing was 45minutes later when we were leaving they still hadn't gotten their food, some treasure of a catch he would of been for one of them.
No comments:
Post a Comment