Dinner, Drinking, and Games

On the way to dinner, the girls introduced themselves as Piara and Ilika (which later turned out to be Chiara and Erika). Chiara, who had visited Florence before, lead us to a pasta bar, near our hostel. We continued our small talk and learned they were both art history majors in their last year of school, that it is difficult to get art grants, and that the citizens of Italy have no hope for their country (neither would I). Brent made a joke that despite the bad economy, everything was great for Italians because they had won the World Cup. Several minutes of translating later, we finally conveyed the joke to one of them, who was able to explain it to the other one, at which point we all laughed together, for separate reasons, of course.

Throughout our conversation, each time Brent or I said something, the girls would hold a forum between themselves to decide what we had said and how to respond. More often than not, the girls would forget that they were supposed to be translating and just continue their conversation without us for several minutes. Meanwhile Brent and I just looked at each other and laughed about how fast they were speaking. Eventually they would remmeber us and remember our question.

I asked them if they wanted to drink wine, to which they answered first No and then "We mean yes." It was confusing but also the answer we wanted to hear. Ordering wine took some time, however, as Brent and I left it to the Italians to pick a good wine. Erika said she knew about wines from her region but not this one and then asked the waitress some questions about the heaviness of each wine, which the waitress had to check with a coworker. I have gathered that Italians are very partial to their forums.

When it came time to order food Brent and I did a very thorough job of butchering the Italian language. But the food was good and it was fun conversing in broken English. After dinner we ordered a round of Limoncello instead of coffee. Brent liked it very much, especially because it gave him the opportunity to sip a liquer daintily, which is his modus operandi when it comes to drinking.

After dinner we headed back to our hostel and finagled them into...

...a game of cards. We played Capitalism first, which they got a huge kick out of. "Only Americans would play a card game called Kapitalismus." We quickly switched to a simpler game of theirs called "Merde," which of course translates to "Shit!"

To play shit, you reduce the deck to the four A, K, Q, and J, deal four cards to each player and pass one card to the left synchronously until one player has four of a kind (the shit), yells "Shit!", and slaps his/her hand in the middle. The other players have to slap in too and the last player to do so receives however many kilos of shit are dictated by drawing a card from the non-played portion deck.

We played until Brent had accumulated about 18kg of shit, at which point they felt bad for beating us and wished we had had two decks so we could play Machiavelli. So I whipped out my second deck (sorry Scott) and we played Machiavelli, which I soon remembered I had played before, though it didn't help me in the least when they slaughtered us over and over.