Roma, Italia-belated birthday

So yesterday, Andrew told me that the Narwhal (his apartment) wanted to skype with me today to wish me a late happy birthday. We set up a time after my dinner (since they had the day off for Columbus Day), and when I logged on we couldn’t get the sound working, only video. We ended up just doing video and chatting, which was a bit silly, but worked (also made even sillier by the fact that I don’t have a working webcam). Anyway, I logged on, and as soon as I saw Michelle there, I got suspicious (Michelle makes amazing birthday cakes and I’ve never had the pleasure of receiving my own…bad timing).

Andrew (I’m assuming he was still the one typing) told me that even though I couldn’t be there, I was still getting a famous Michelle cake! And since I love Threadless so much (www.threadless.com), she made my favorite shirt! She has a t-shirt shaped pan, and decorated it with the shirt design, which is a beautiful blue line drawing of Florence on dark blue with thin pretty trees at the top. The cake was beautiful! They spent a while zooming the webcam all around showing me all the detail, and then they lit the candle so I could “blow it out”. “I” then proceeded to cut the cake, take the first bite, and wipe my mouth because I had made a mess. The whole thing was absolutely hilarious and so adorable, I was laughing soooo hard. The cake was even chocolate! A little bummed I couldn’t taste it, but there’s always next year.

After that, a handful of us went out for drinks with Beth, our professor’s wife. They leave midday Thursday, and David Bell, our second studio professor, comes on Saturday. Beth is always watching Nash and Faye and thus hasn’t really gotten a chance to go out in Rome yet, so we told her to leave David with the kids and come out with us. We ended up finding a wine bar and just sitting around for 2-3 hours just chatting…it was a ton of fun! It hasn’t even hit me that they’re leaving this week. We went out for gelato afterwards though, and I got truffle (very good but very liqueur-y) and eggnog, which was less boozey and spicy, much more eggey, but TOTALLY delicious. I may have to go back to this one place again just to get it.

Another happy discovery today: I found tofu!! It turns out one of the corner tabacchi near us sells it, but the times that I’ve gone in they’ve only had veggie burgers (tasty, but just not the same), but now they have tofu! So tonight Caitlin made chicken curry over rice, and I subbed in tofu! I’m such a happy vegetarian right now. I also made scrambled eggs for lunch today with market scallions and tomatoes and store-bought feta. I bought some potato-rosemary focaccia from the Forno, and it was super tasty. I also rocked my new purple boots today and still managed to walk in them with a beautiful swagger J

PICTURE: Michelle’s cake for me and the original inspiration!