Best Restaurant of 2009

What has two thumbs and was at work for 12 hours yesterday?

—> This girl <—

I’ll spare you the geeky details (/me mumbles something about FAT32 partitions, HDD power cables and a ghost image that took five hours to deploy). Let’s just say that next time that particular computer breaks? I’m fixing it with a hammer. Possibly of the sledge variety.

I was too busy repeatedly smashing a keyboard  last night to blog. So today I give you two days worth of the Best of 2009. I’ll post my second response later.

First up? Restaurant experience. This is a tough choice in the same sense that choosing between chocolate ice cream and chocolate cake is a tough choice (decision? cake. with a heaping scoop of the ice cream on top). I’m tempted to choose our splurge dinner during our trip to Europe. We ate at this tiny little restaurant in Italy where we were pretty much the only patrons. Our waiter was fantastic. He quickly guessed that we were American, but genuinely appreciated our attempts to speak in a language besides English. We ended up communicating in some bastard hybrid of Italian, French and Spanish. He also taught me the correct pronunciations of all of the items on the menu.

He didn’t bother teaching Kristian.

Ha.

I love genuinely connecting with other people while traveling. And this was a connection of the genuine variety. We were joking and laughing like old friends. What can I say? Any and all of Kristian’s attempts at pronouncing words not in English are pretty much completely and utterly hilarious.

The food was amazing. We went whole hog and got the five-course menu. And split a bottle of wine. I would put the culinary experience in the top ten of my life. Maybe even the top five.

I asked Kristian what he thought our best restaurant experience of 2009 was and he said, “Italy, for sure.”

But that’s just because he didn’t spend the next day and a half puking his guts off.

I can’t say that it was dinner for sure, but that was the only meal that Kristian and I didn’t eat the exact same thing. And I was the only person praying to the porcelain goddess the next morning. Even with the food poisoning, I’d be tempted to say Italy. I mean, if an experience ending in vomiting was automatically considered to be a bad one, I technically didn’t have a lot of fun in college.

Even so, I’m going to have to say that Italy didn’t exactly stick the landing, if you know what I mean. Wink, wink. Nudge, nudge.

I’m going to have to say that my favorite restaurant experience of 2009 would have to be another one from the same trip. It was the day that all of the students arrived, and we’d been up since the ass crack of dawn. We’d spent hours herding cats shepherding students. We’d been on our feet all day. We were tired, hungry and nobody wanted to make dinner. As a thank you for all of our hard work, the director of the program took us all out to a local restaurant called Cafe de la Place. The food was delicious, we split a couple bottles of wine. And? Most importantly? We all laughed our asses off.

Deep, guttural belly laughs. The kind of laughs that you only get when you’ve spent the last 10+ hours dealing with complete and utter chaos and have emerged, triumphant at the end. We told stories of student craziness. Of host-parent insanity. About the girl who took it upon herself to walk back through customs, ignoring about 17 “No Re-Entry” signs. A story made all the more hilarious by the fact that our director told us a similar story that morning. In response to our question, “what’s the craziest thing a student has ever done on arrival day?”

Let’s not forget that Kristian also arrived that day. I hadn’t seen him in almost two weeks. So I was a wee bit excited to see him.

So, in (not-so) short:

good food + good people + side-splitting laughter + kristian + wine = Best Restaurant Experience EVAR*

* In 2009