Just wanted to share the adventurous weekend that Jordan and I had!! On Saturday, Jordan woke up early to hop on a bus and head to Palermo for the young elephants football game! After being on the bus for 3 hours, they arrived at the stadium - an old decrepid baseball field that looked like it hadn't been used in years. Since Palermo doesn't have an adult team, their adults play on their 'young' team. This means that our 16,17, & 18 year olds were playing against 25, 30, and 30+ year olds . . . a disadvantage to say the least. When Jordan called to tell me about the game, him and Nate thought it would be funny to tell me they won - I got really excited - until I heard that they had really lost 69-0. . . womp, womp, womp. After the game, the team had a 3 hour bus ride back, complete with the young guys serenading Nate with love songs haha. When the boys got back they showered and we all headed out to Mercadi - one of our favorite clubs that we've talked about before. Nate's love interest was there so it made for a very interesting night. On Sunday we had a pretty lazy day. We had left our car at Nate's house in Aci Trezza so we had no means of transportation. We also had no Euros on our phones and neither did Nate which meant we couldn't get ahold of each other. After several facebook messages, skype attempts, and finally a google call, we got ahold of Nate. He came and picked us up and took us back to his house to pick up our car! Hooray! Jordan and I decided that since it was a pretty chill day, we'd try out a mexican food restaurant that we had seen a couple weeks before. This is where the real adventure begins . . .
We left our apartment at around 9 pm to head to 'Carlito's'. We decided to drive instead of walk because it was a bit of a ways away from our apartment. Before we could head to the restaurant, however, we had to stop at the bancomat to get some money. The bancomat that we stopped at was in a rather sketchy area of town so Jordan and I both got out of the car and I played lookout while he worked the atm. After we got our money we headed back to our car 'the pixo' and tried to start it . . . nothing. After multiple more tries, we decided to pop the hood and see if we could figure out the problem (because we're both so car savvy haha). Jordan looked under the hood first while I tried to start the car. After my first attempt all I could hear was Jordan laughing really hard. He told me 'I needed to see this' so I got out and looked under the hood while he tried to start the car. The engine was literally shaking, sputtering, and generally not looking very engine-like.
After many tries, we decided that it was time to give up. We called one of the Italian players, Christian, who handed the phone to the manager, Davide, and told him our dilemma. He told us to make sure the car was parked in a safe place and that we would worry about it tomorrow. After we hung up the phone, I got behind the wheel and the hubs pushed our dear pixo into a parking lot about 20 feet away. After the car was safely in a parking spot, we decided what the heck, might as well head to the mexican restaurant for dinner anyway! And now Jordan will take it from here . . .
Pizza Files: Mexican food pt. 2 - Carlito's Cantina
So after all that, we have to make the decision, 'do we turn around and walk back and eat somewhere closer to our house, or go try and find Carlito's?'.. Even though it will be about another 15 minute walk and we don't know exactly where it is, we decide that after all this misfortune, we FS need some mexican food to cheer up and set the world right again. We continue onward in the general direction, I am the guide, and my trusty sidekick is Mrs. Amberly Lake. After a few wrong turns and and a little extra exercise, we decide to ask for some help. So after we walk up to another restaurant only to ask for directions to the local mexcian ristorante, we get angrily pointed in the right direction and find our spot a few blocks over. Once we get inside, we have high hopes because of the true mexican/tex-mex motif of the restaurant... and cause we saw chips and salsa on the way to our table. The salsa had a surprisingly good taste even though it had the look and texture of tomato soup. The menu was translated (another good sign), but there were probably about 100 grammatical mistakes (not a good sign because it means they are still Italians trying to learn how to cook mexican food). After thoroughly looking over the menu and getting a bunch of cheap laughs (jalapenos = 'mexican spicy peppers' over here), we decided to order some queso and margaritas. The problem with queso over here, is that because they don't have cheddar cheese and are so used to melted cheese looking like what you would get on a normal pizza, that is basically what you are served in a bowl with tortillas cut into chip form. So the next time you eat a pizza, imagine scooping all that cheese off, throwing it in a bowl, stirring it up a bit, and then giving it to someone without any real type of dipping utensil to get said 'queso' out of the bowl. I swear to god you could just bring over Velveta and cans of Rotel, make the simplest form of queso, and your mexican restaurant would already has a colossal leg up on any other competition. After the queso, came the margaritas... yikes. I don't know whether it's a taste thing or if limes just aren't easy to get here, but their standard house margs are lemon flavored. Yes, you read that right, lemon margaritas. Only its not lemonade tasting, its just all the bitter and tasteless flavors of the lemon served in margarita form. Almost as disappointing as the flavor of the marg, was that I was served in a leaky glass. So by the end of the night I looked like a 3 year old who couldn't keep from spilling all over his place mat... awesome. After that ordeal, it was finally time to eat. I had the beef fajitas with a side of black beans ( you have to order and pay extra for your sides such as rice, beans etc which I found very strange), and Amberly had the appetizer sampler (flautas, nachos, quesadillas, and onion rings). The fajitas were tasty and although the portion size was for that of a small child, I was happy with the meal. Amberly's food was also pretty good except for the onion rings, which when translated to Italian apparently means a fried red pepper with cheese... strange but good. If I had to rank Carlito's on a scale of 1-10 (1 being 'Yogi & Boo Boo's' and 10 being 'El Patio' in Houston) I would probably only give it a 4. Having said that, it was still good to eat some mexican food and enjoy a change up from our usual diet of pasta, chicken, or pizza. BTW, If anyone wants be business partners, I'm looking for investors to help with the launch of Amberly and I's mexican food restaurant over here that will no doubt put all these other hacks out of business and will be very successful... just a thought. After dinner wrapped up we decided to walk back by the pixo and try to start it one last time before we left it for dead. nd as luck would have it, the old girl sputtered to life and hung on just long enough for us to drive home. All in all, it was a ridiculous, but fun night... untill I had to wake up the next morning and push our car (uphill) to the local gas station. That's it for now, back to back days of blogging and our 3rd in 4 days... WE'RE BACK!!!
JL & AL
Love the dual entry! One question though, what is FS?
ReplyDeleteAnd....hows the car?