Back from the land of expressos

I'm back from my honeymoon. It was quite an adventure, 7 cities in 17 days.

Lemme talk about the not so great stuff first.

2 Regrets:

(1) I didn't buy the branded stuff. I would have liked to have at least invested in a nice pair of sunnies, a few bags, a few wallets, a few good pair of leather shoes. They are cheaper over there! Ask me where to go buy them, I'll have recommendations. But it's kinda not a regret anymore, now that the economy is bad, and there are even rumours that we won't be getting increments next year, and who knows what other bad news.

(2) We didn't get to go the nature places in Italy. Like Lake Como, Dolomites, Cinque Terre, Sorrento/ Amalfi Coast/ Capri. Boo... Hoo... As we were in cities most of the time, it wasn't very romantic. But, it's also not really a regret anymore, 'cuz squeezing these into our itinerary meant we would have to spend more money on transport, and it would have tired us out doing all the commuting and packing schedules.

Hence, no regrets afterall.

Some disappointment:

I wanted to go to Italy because some of my fave foods are pasta, coffee, seafood, steak, risottos, cheeses...and Italy is definitely the to-go place for pasta and coffee.

Surprise, surprise, the good tasting pasta are only found in the higher-end ristorantes and trattorias. Otherwise, some of them probably taste so-so only, or even worse than what an average person can prepare. So, that was pretty disappointing. Nonetheless, almost every day I'm still craving for pasta and more pasta.

Coffee was widely available. It was only during the second part of our trip that we discovered the Italian culture of drinking expresso in the day. They would order expressos at the bar, dump two packs of sugar into the expresso without thinking, and drink it down in one or two gulps. We decided to add that in to our daily rountine during the trip..and it was fun. Expressos are cheap, around 0.90 Euros per cup.

Overall, I would say I can find good tasting Italian food quite easily in Singapore too. So, the food aspect didn't quite meet my expectations.

The good stuff in later blogs...ciao!