If you have the good fortune to work in one of the UN organizations based in Europe you find yourself surrounded by Europeans speaking English…creatively. Prepositions pop up in the least expected places and false cognates run rampant. Here is a portion of the recent facebook chat with a Dutch friend who is quite possibly one of the most adorable girls in the world:

              me: I need to eat dinner. I’m hungry.

              Iris: o i bet you will

             me: When are you heading to the movie?

             Iris: totally! great idea grrl!

I am slain by her enthusiastic and brilliant use of my language. If I chatted like Iris, I would definitely have more friends.

Another advantage of working in a large Europe-based UN organization is that you will primarily be working with Europeans. Europeans who come from countries that have amazing food cultures, who you can finagle into participating in the 2010 Chocolate World Championships.

The idea for the 2010 CWC was hatched in October, during lunch on a dull Wednesday. We decided that we would all bring back chocolate from our home countries after the holidays and embark on a quest to discover the world’s best chocolate. Last night, we did it.

The beautiful Italian offering beautiful Italian chocolates

Samir looking very French

The contenders: Swedish, French, Italian, Dutch, Swiss, Tunisian, Austrian and American chocolates

So who won? Well… one of the French made homemade truffles. Needless to say he took home the grand prize. #2 was Sweden and #3 was Austria. My favorite part was hearing the theme songs and slogans for the various Swedish chocolate bars. Mmm…Marabou.

A few weeks ago I woke up on Saturday and it was sunny, gorgeously sunny, impossibly sunny for the end of November. I grabbed a friend and we decided to escape from Rome for the morning. Only about 25 minutes outside of the city by car (with early Saturday morning traffic) is Tivoli, home to two UNESCO heritage sites – Hadrian’s Villa and the Villa d’Este. I can handle a maximum of one heritage site per day so we decided to visit the 16^th century Villa d’Este.

Cardinal Ippolito II d’Este, the original owner, descended from ancestors including Bavarian kings, Northern Italian rulers and, supposedly, Hercules.  Of course. Over the years the estate evolved as his descendents maintained the gardens and commissioned additional works of art.

The piazza leading to Villa d’Este is surprisingly shabby with drab buildings and a few half-hearted tourist stands. But behind the villa walls are some of the most beautiful Renaissance gardens to be found in Italy. Sprawling and verdant, it took us about two hours to wander through the entire estate.

Tucked into every nook and cranny are fountains, ranging from the enormous baroque monstrosity of the Water Organ Fountain (arrive at the right time of day and you can hear it play music) to the lovely boat-shaped Fontana della Rometta. These are the fountains that inspired Liszt’s piano piece “Giochi d’acqua a Villa d’Este,” composed while he was a guest at the villa in the 19^th century. 

In true Roman fashion, the villa is only partially outfitted for tourists. The fountains and sculptures  have placards explaining the origin of the works in Italian and English - unfortunately most of these placards have rubbed away with time and are illegible. Equally inconveniently, the visitor’s center does not provide or sell maps of the estate to guide your walk.

After exploring the gardens and touring the house, I passed a pleasant half hour on the villa’s terrace with a coffee and a good book (After Dark – I’m on a Murakami kick lately). I can’t wait to return in spring when all of the roses are in bloom, with a picnic and a guide book.

Tivoli is about 30 kilometers from Rome. You can take the Cotral bus from Ponte Mammolo or Stazione Tiburtina. You can also take the train from Stazione Tiburtina. The train takes a little over an hour and costs 2.30 euros. From the Tivoli station you take a shuttle bus to the town center. In a car you can take Autostrada A24 from Rome.

Villa d’Este (tel. 39.0445.230.310.) is off of Piazza Trento and is open from 8:30 am to one hour before sunset. Full price is €6.50 and reduced price is €3.25 (reduced price for EU residents between 18 and 24, free for EU citzens under 18 and over 65). The Organ Fountain plays every 2 hours starting at 10:30 am.

What do you call a Thanksgiving Dinner that lasts from 8:30 PM to 1:30 AM? Where all 12 people have enough food to eat, both pies are polished off, the music never stops playing and the wine never stops flowing? I would say you call it a success. Thank you to all the lovely people in Rome who made my holiday so much fun!

My shelf of the refrigerator became overloaded with eggs, cream, and butter in the days before the meal.

Pumpkin pie!

Cornbread stuffing and arugula salad

Almost ready for the dinner...

 

Tomorrow is a holiday for Americans. And for those of us who love food and love to cook, Thanksgiving is an especially fun holiday. I couldn’t let the fact that I’m on the wrong continent stop me from celebrating. So how do you organize a Thanksgiving dinner if you have no American friends, are in a foreign country, and work a full-time job and two side jobs? It just takes ambition, planning, and enthusiasm.

Luckily I have all three. Plus a lovely Dutch friend who is excited about hosting it in her apartment. Because we are workers, the dinner will be Friday rather than Thursday. And because I am poor, we will eat roast chickens not turkey. Here are the critical stats:

Menu: roast chickens, cornbread stuffing, creamed spinach, glazed carrots, salad, mashed potatoes and gravy, biscuits, chocolate pie, pumpkin pie

Guests: 10 Europeans + me

Ambiance: Specially prepared playlist to showcase America’s musical talent, home-made construction paper turkeys, a small speech explaining what Thanksgiving actually is (there is some confusion about this among my friends)

I have already made the dough for the biscuit and the crusts for the pie, roasted the pumpkin, and made cornbread for the stuffing.

I am so excited.

A welcoming menu at Nuraghe Sardo

I had grand ambitions for Friday night. I was finally going to go to Alexanderplatz, the most famous jazz club in Rome (which isn’t really saying much but if you’re born in New Orleans you have to at least make an effort). I have a limited number of friends in Italy who enjoy jazz as much as I do but I managed to persuade an open-minded Marcheggiano that he wanted to come along. However, he insisted that we eat first. And because he is Italian our dinner reservations were for 9:30 and dinner took 3 hours. No jazz for Madeline. On the plus side I had a fantastic meal at a tiny Sardinian restaurant.

This is about 2/3 of the antipasto...only the cold parts.

I have Italian friends who malign Sardinian cuisine but I’ve always had good experiences at Sardinian restaurants (there’s a charming one with amazing cheeses on Via San Carlo in Bologna). Because Sardinia is an island with lots of forest and grazing land, the cuisine is heavy on both fish and meat. And the cheeses… Not to mention that their main white wine, Vermentino, is refreshingly crisp and usually priced cheaper than those of Northern Italy.

Nuraghe Sardo was highly recommended by a colleague and deservedly so. Tons of exceedingly fresh seafood for a good price (especially for Rome). The brightly lit atmosphere is far from romantic but the waiters are sweet and all have Sardinian accents. The seafood antipasto was incredibly generous and for 10 euros you can taste: 3-4 types of smoked fish, multiple squid and octopus salads, a smoky chickpea and squid stew, and mussels. I barely had room for dessert, which was a scrumptious custard.

Nuraghe Sardo - Highly Recommended. FYI, a nuraghe is a megalithic stone structure commonly found in Sardinia.

Ristorante Nuraghe Sardo is open daily. Viale delle Medaglie D’Oro, 50a. Tel. (39) 06.397.36584. Located in the NW part of the city, not too far from the Vatican complex. You can reach it with public transportation by taking Metro Line A to Cipro or line 990 to Pieve di Cadore.

Lunch on the Terrace

Me and my colleagues worked without pause the beginning of this week. On Wednesday a group of us rewarded ourselves with lunch on the terrace of my friend’s lovely apartment in Monteverde. The sun was shining, it was in the 60s, and the meal didn’t end until almost 4. On the menu: quenelles, bread, mortadella, prosciutto, arugula, mozzarella, eggs, peanut butter, nutella, clementines, and wine. This is what every day should be like in Rome.

The days are slipping away from me. I leave for work, I return from work, I do side jobs, I call my family and then suddenly it’s Sunday and I realize I have neglected to blog/photograph/visit the Caravaggio-Bacon exhibit/do every other small pleasure I mean to do weekly. Hopefully after the insanity that is the Summit this week my life will calm down and I can settle into my favorite routines.

I’m getting to know my neighborhood better with each passing day. I live in the center of Rome but not the historic center, a largely residential neighborhood where you don’t hear English spoken and a glass of wine costs 2.50 Euros. On the corner is a little bar owned by a nice Albanian named Roberto. He’s lived in Italy for 13 years, has 3 children, can speak fluent Russian and knows how to fly a helicopter. I’ve learned all of this when I stop in on my way home from work. By now Roberto has noticed that I don’t eat the spicy bruschette and brings me extra tomato and basil ones instead. We have a good relationship.

The results of Monday's strudel-making lesson, courtesy of an Austrian colleague.

 So I spent the past week learning to make strudel, struggling to not fall behind in work, and preparing for two major conferences. I’m now just finishing up my work at the second conference and life should settle down. I have a weekend getaway planned for the end of November and a day-trip to Napoli on the horizon. In the next few days I’m heading to one of Rome’s most famous coffee places. But tonight after the end of all this mayhem, I’m just going to enjoy a quiet glass of wine with Roberto and then a good night’s sleep.

It’s Sunday night and another work week begins all too soon. Rome weather has been schizophrenic lately, alternating thundershowers and sun multiple times each day. When combined with the equally inconsistent public transportation system, this has amounted to a weekend with a lot of standing in the rain for Madeline. Luckily I have an umbrella.

I spent most of this weekend in the Roman neighborhood of Testaccio. South of the city on the East bank of the Tiber, Testaccio is a fun, young neighborhood with a string of good nightclubs along one of its hills. It has fewer tourists and American students than nearby Trastevere and consequently costs a bit less.

Friday night began with an aperitivo with a colleague at L’Oasi della Birra, then dinner at Acqua e Farina with a friend. The aperitivo at L’Oasi was an insanely extensive buffet – stuffed and marinated vegetables, 2 kinds of quiche, 5 kinds of cured meat, several cheeses, rice salads, pasta salads, etc. It’s a relaxed place with a basement that has cozy tables ideal for aperitivos more romantic than mine (my colleague is very cute but married and female so the atmosphere was a bit wasted on us). After so much indulgence I wasn’t able to stomach an entire pizza. Luckily, Acqua e Farina is an Italian chain that specializes in smaller nibbles and I was able to have just one 3 inch pizza rossa, super-thin crust pizza slathered with marinara sauce, while my friend ate several pizzas and some kind of incredible folded crepe thing enclosing cheese, ham and eggplant. Da Remo still wins my award for best pizza in Testaccio but Acqua e Farina has much less of a wait on Friday nights.

Pizzetta from Acqua e Farina

Saturday night saw me at Caruso – a Latin dance club – for the first time. It was another colleague’s birthday celebration and a lovely night. The crowd was international with tons of men who could actually dance (and lacked the usual hordes of Italian men scanning the dance floor for foreign girls lacking in sobreity and judgment). Ladies have an opportunity to get up on stage and shake it to reggaeton. It will go unstated whether or not this opportunity was seized by my colleagues and I.

Today I joined forces with my flatmates in cleaning our apartment, did some grocery shopping and studied French and Spanish verbs. Now I’m researching the history of tiramisu for a writing project (interesting side note: tiramisu is much younger than you would think) before a friend takes me to dinner at one of the restaurants in my neighborhood. Report to follow…..

L’Oasi della Birra - Website currently under construction. Open daily 19:00-00:30. Piazza Testaccio, 41. Tel. +39 06 5746122. To reach with public transportation take tram 3, buses 23, 30, 75, 95, 170, 280, 716, or the metro line B to Piramide.

Acqua e Farina – Open daily 12:30-2:30 and 19:30-23:30. Piazza Orazio Giustiniani, 2. Tel. +39 06 574 1382

Caruso Cafe – Via di Monte Testaccio, 36. Tel. +39 06 5745019. Open until 3:30 AM Tues-Thurs and Sunday, until 4:30 AM Friday and Saturday. Closed Monday. Dress is “trendy casual” – most girls are wearing either jeans and a cute top or a small dress, guys in typical club attire.

So because I am a completely logical and rational person, I have decided it is absolutely necessary that I re-learn Spanish. This would probably make more sense if I were in a place where people around me were actually speaking Spanish. Like Spain. Or Buenos Aires. Or the United States.

Learning Spanish when surrounded by Italian is hard. So I found a language exchange buddy. Because I am a very lucky girl, my new friend is not only nice but also likes to escape Rome during the weekends and has lived here long enough to discover some nice places.

Google Map of Gaeta

Saturday we took a train and a bus and ended up in Gaeta. A small town perched on a peninsula south of Rome there’s nothing truly spectacular about Gaeta. But it’s a charming seaside town and now that the summer tourists have gone, incredibly peaceful. We walked around the port while I butchered Spanish and then had incredible vermicelli with seafood marinara while he (much more skillfully) spoke English.

At the end of the day we sat on the beach and watched the sun set. I heard stories about Colombia and told my own about the States. We stayed just long enough to see the sun set before catching a bus back to Formia and a train to Rome.

Trains from Rome to Formia run frequently. The Regional takes around two hours and costs about 7 Euros while the Intercity is closer to one hour and costs 13 Euros. Either way, plan for the train to be running late. Buses from Formia to Gaeta cost 1 Euro, you can buy tickets at the bar inside the train station.

If you have lunch in Gaeta, an excellent place with reasonable prices is La Taverna del Marinaio (Via faustina, 36. Tel. 0771.461342) The house white wine is quite good and the seafood pastas are phenomenal.

It’s been over a month since I arrived in Rome. In stark contrast to my last time in Italy, I haven’t been traveling at all. In the entirety of this time the furthest I had been out of Rome was to go to dinner in Castel Gandalfo twenty minutes away.

I didn’t realize until this weekend how claustrophobic I was feeling. Sunday, in spite of the fact that I had work to do for both of my jobs, I allowed two friends to kidnap me for a day trip. We not only left Rome, we left the entire region of Lazio. True, we only drove one hour but that’s one of the beautiful things about Italy. One hundred kilometers and you can go from weaving through busloads of waddling tourists to this:

We drove east until we came to Abruzzo. I’ve been to Abruzzo a number of times but on the other end, near the Le Marche border. There Abruzzo is pastoral - hills of vineyards and grazing sheep in the interior and sunny seaside towns. The Abruzzo-Lazio border doesn’t have hills, it has mountains. Gran Sasso is the highest peak of the Appennines and right now, during the pre-skiing season, it’s empty.

On the recommendation of Marco’s father we drove to Campo Felice, a small town. Parts of the mountains were so high that they were rockface devoid of vegetation, a strange, alien landscape that one of my friends called “lunare.” On the altopiano we saw cows, donkeys, and wild horses. No human beings. It was surreal and a welcome break from the jostling chaos that is life in Rome (I think I can count only one day since my arrival that I have not been pushed, yelled at, or patted on the cheek by a stranger in the street. This is a city that reaches out and interacts with you. Literally.)

After a few hours of Safari Abruzzo, during which I, enraptured, photographed cows (I have a thing about livestock) and the boys complained about the wind messing up their hair, we decided it was time for lunch. I adore Sundays in Italy because they’re basically an excuse to have a decadent multi-course meal before napping the afternoon away. We found a little trattoria in the nearby town – if a settlement consisting of two streets can be called as such – and waited for a table near the fireplace.

Three courses of cured meats, cheeses, tripe, grilled vegetables, ravioli, gnocchi, sausages and arrosticini later we were stuffed. We drove back to Campo Felice and read the newspaper before packing up to head back to the city. We hit traffic returning to Rome and spent two hours driving 20 kilometers. I already missed the cows.