Festa!

Alora, my dad called me and asked me if we had air conditioning. It turns out that my apartment does not...I am SO glad I booked my flight early to avoid all the dog days of August. I don't even remember what it was like not to have air conditioning, but I know it was bad. It's strange how we've been keeping all the windows in our apartment open but no bugs have come in. I hope this applies to mosquitoes in the future.

On Thursday 56 new rats arrived, and we handled them and put them in cages. On Saturday I went in again and petted all 56 of those buggers for about 3-4 minutes each. I must not be doing it right because they are still pretty nervous, but it may be just too early to tell.

On Friday night my PI Dr. Aldo Badiani invited the whole lab to his house for a dinner party to celebrate my arrival. He's a very strong-willed, obsessive, and opinionated person, but he is also one of the kindest people I've known. Dr. Badiani lives in a very nice penthouse apartment with a large terrace, which is where we had our courses that came out one by one. The first dish was a pasta dish with tuna, fresh tomatoes, and two different types of olives. The second was a sweet prosciutto ham with melons.

Back row: Maria Teresa, Michele Celetano, me, Vera Spagnolo, Dr. Badiani (looking fierce). Front row: Ricardo, Daniele Caprioli, Alessandro, and Dr. Michele Millino. Not present: Arianna (who is taking the picture), Valentina, Frederica, Davide, and Stefania.

This is bresaola, a very lean prosciutto (except it's not really prosciutto because it's made of beef), wrapped around goat cheese with horse radish.

Two different types of salami. The one on the right is made of boar meat, which is caught in the forests of central eastern Italy. The salami was served with unsalted bread (a slice is in the background).

This is unsalted bread with goat cheese and raisins drizzled in honey.

This is pecorino, or aged goat cheese. This specific one was aged in a pit. It was served with honey.

For dessert, Dr. Badiani bought two cakes from "the best pastry shop in all of Rome." The one in front has profiterolles, or pastry balls filled with cream and covered in chocolate. The other one is a raspberry torte cake topped with powdered sugar. As usual, Badiani is looking ferosh.

On Saturday, we went to Arricia, a town southeast of Rome, which is known for its pork, or "Porketta Arricia." My friends kept saying, "it's not too elegant" or "it's not very glamorous," but it was a great meal and very cute!

You might be able to make out all sorts of cheeses, ham, salami, jerky, etc. To the left and not in the picture was an entire roasted pig.

This was about half the food we were served. You can see (from top) roasted pork, peppers, fresh olives, mozarella balls, beans, zucchini, pecorino, jerky, salami and prosciutto, bread with filato cheese. We also had sausage links, grilled skewers of lamb, potatoes, spinach, and bread. The mozarella is not real mozarella because it was not made from the milk of a water buffalo.

For dessert some people ordered the tiramisu, but I had the Catalan cream, which is a cream whipped with egg and then cooked and topped with caramel. By the end of the meal we were all very, very stuffed. I slept very well that night, and for once we didn't go for a late-night gelato.