(March 2025)
So yeah, this post might be a little PG-13
It’s been a long week and so we finally returned to the restaurant Sam desecrated a week ago and refused to ever return to (What happened?!?Sigh… remember the place Pane e Vino where the foul fowl covered in yuck was served? Sam’s barf trigger has been on high alert ever since, and Restaurant Umbria served something to somebody with the tiniest bit of liver in it, to a table far far away—but it was enough: hands clenched over her face, Sam raced to the restroom, and stayed inside quite a while. I eventually got there as she stormed out, “we’re leaving!!!!” But instead, I bravely entered …. let’s just say that aiming isn’t particularly Sam’s strong suit. She told me later she had attempted to clean the walls off before I got there 😂😂 I believe her, but I also believe not a single chunk made it into the toilet! I was standing ankle-deep in, umm, stuff… and BTW red wine doesn’t make a particularly lovely shade of puke. It was a lot like that elevator scene from The Shining. I attempted to swab up as best I could, but it was still a horrifying crime scene when we finally slinked out). We have been too embarrassed to show our faces there ever since.
But we figured it was time to conquer our fears and return to this restaurant!! It really is very good.
We get seated, and the entire place fills up behind us. Evidently a conference of some sort? Throughout lunch we get a strong feeling that these people were academics of some sort. What gives them away? Tweed jackets, slightly disheveled appearances, some vague eccentricities… trust me, I have grown up around these types, I can still spot them in the wild.
The table behind us finally stands up to leave, and we (by that I mean Sam) speak to them, and a guy totally compliments her on her pronunciation (which happens a lot here actually) and so they fall into a conversation about northern Italian pronunciation versus southern. The man asks if he can be blunt with us, and then he explains that to speak here, “you must fuck your vowels!!! Fuck them!!,” accompanied by a forceful hand gesture. “Fuck your vowels!!!!” he repeats in a shout!!!
We are both dying laughing 🤣 Was not expecting this, I learned that my high school Spanish teacher could have been a lot more forceful, I think us kids would have remembered a lecture like that!
And now, a bunch of pix again
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