A Spur-of-the-Moment Post

I wasn't really sure what to write on today, so I decided to take a couple pictures of what's on my desk, as they are actually very informative about some foodstuffs here in Italy.

Here is my glorious pile of food and drink:

Starting from the left, we have:

1. Pane bianco (white bread).  A regular loaf of sliced white bread.  Not all bread here comes in roll form!
2. Two old pizza boxes that I have been too lazy to bring out to the dumpster to dispose of.  The pizzerie (plural in Italian for pizzeria) here are surprisingly like those in the US, and the pizzas here actually don't taste too much different from American pizza, except if you ask for pepperoni, you get peppers, not sausages!  Also, people here eat pizza using a fork and knife.
3. On top of the pizza boxes, a carton of flauti d'albicocca, which are quite Twinkie-like, but this particular box has apricot-flavored filling.  These kinds of items, along with croissants, brioches, and biscotti, are the most popular breakfast items.  People usually just have something small and sweet like this along with some cappuccino to get them through the morning.
4. A bag of Abbracci (literally "hugs") cookies, which are named as such because each cookie has a cream-flavored half and a coffee-flavored half stuck together.
5. Some Coca-Cola and Fanta cans in the 330 mL size that is the standard here for a can.  The sodas here taste different from in America because sugar is used instead of high-fructose corn syrup.  The taste is different - you could argue either way as to which is better - but the sugar option is the less unhealthy for sure.  I quite like the Coca-Colas here, though the Fanta was surprisingly sweet - a bit too much for my taste, actually.

More on beverages will be coming in a future post, but for now let's take a look at my simple Americanized dinner.

Here we have some Mortadella, which is a meat from the city of Bologna, and which the American bologna is modeled after.  The meat is a sausage made from ground pork and cubes of lard (which explains the white squares).  American bologna, meanwhile, has no lard cubes because of US government regulations (also because it might not fly so well in the States).

Something to note is that the meat here is sliced much thinner than in the US.  Along the same lines, while sandwiches (panini!) are popular here, none of them have as much meat as the sandwiches in the US.  I like it this way, as I have always thought that the monster American sandwiches are much to excessive in many ways.  Also, people here aren't quite as carnivorous as they are in America.  The meals we've been eating have been about 25% meat, 35% starch, and 40% vegetables.  In fact, my supervisor seems to only eat meat during the antipasto!  I think this is funny because he is one who uses a lot of swear words and I tend to correlate swear usage to carnivorousness.

On a random note, I just did my laundry, which is rather expensive at €2.50 ($3.75) to wash and €2.50 to dry.  To save some money, I decided to air-dry my clothes, only to find out that someone is already using my wing's drying rack.  So I went to Plan B and successfully laid out all my clothes to dry.  In addition to hanging what I could on closet racks, towel racks, and open closet doors, I 1) put some shirts on my bed, desk, and chair, 2) moved my books onto the floor so I could fit 12 socks on the shelf, and 3) used the small armoire in the back corner to lay out shirts and underwear in a fashion reminiscent of a concept my 2.009 team came up with last year.

This weekend, we're going to Monaco and Nice, where I'll get a chance to see the Tour de France!  So exciting!!!