Cultural Night: Italia

Having stayed there the longest during our Europe trip, there are a lot of cultural aspects to Italy. For our July cultural night, we decided to focus on art and food.

Food: Pop was raving about this pizza restaurant he went to and he wanted me to try it. It was one of his hole in the wall places. Unfortunately, he couldn't remember the name of the place so we couldn't look up the delivery number and he had to get it to-go. We were supposed to eat it during the movie but he later found out that the restaurant was already closed for business so we had to change our plans. We contemplated on making pizza but we lacked some ingredients and it was already late so we decided to just have dinner at Olive Garden.

 

Movie: After dinner, we watched a movie named The Agony and The Ecstasy. It is about Michaelangelo's life. This movie was recommended to us by a guide during our tour of the Vatican Museum. Technically, this is more of the Vatican City not Italy which are two different countries but since we will not be doing a Vatican City night, this will do.

While watching the movie, we decided to do some wine drinking as well. 

Activity: Italian food is considered as one, if not the most, popular food in the world so we decided to make cooking as our activity. Since we just ate pasta from a friend's house the previous week and making pizza from scratch takes time (according to previous experience), we decided not to do those. The dish of choice: risotto, since we have never tried making one before and they do not have this in Olive Garden's menu. We ate gelato for dessert.

I would like to apologize to the Italians for this lackluster attempt at exploring their culture. Their are definitely some more aspects to know about Italy including but not limited to:

• art (most of the famous artists like all the names of the ninja turtles originated from there),
• architecture/sculptures (you could really see the great amount of detail they put on the churches and statues), 
• sports (soccer; Ferrari is a popular sports car)
• fashion (Armani, Gucci, Prada....none of which I dare afford though :)) ) 
• music (opera singer Pavarotti is Italian)
• literature (Roman mythology)

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Cultural Night: Ethiopia

Inspired by the interesting things we learned about different countries during our Europe tour, our travel project #2 was conceptualized. We decided to generally call it as Cultural Night. It will be celebrated every 17th or 22nd of the month, whichever is closer to the weekend, and it will serve as our monthsary date. It will consist of three elements related to the country/region of choice: food, movie and activity. Since there are about 200 countries in the world and for it to be achievable, I limited our draw lot entries to those countries/regions with food/ingredients that can be found in the Tucson area.

For our first cultural night, the theme drawn was Ethiopian. According to Yelp, there are two restos serving Ethiopian cuisines in Tucson: Zemam's and Cafe Desta. Since Popy has been to to Zemam's before and its review score is a little bit higher than Cafe Desta, we decided to go to the former.

We ordered the combination and meat sampler, Ethiopian coffee and Ethiopian tea. For the combination sampler, I chose the spinach wat, zigni and doro wat. For the meat sampler, Popy ordered lega tibs, yedoro alicha, and mincheta bish. In Ethiopia, "often women feed the men with their fingers as a mark of love and devotion to them" so I made sure we didn't miss out on that. hehe!



Eating Ethiopian food for the first time, my notion of the food is a little bit different. As expected, some of the wat was on the spicy side but it was good. One is even similar to our afritada. Initially, I thought that the injera is just like a pita bread but it is more like a spongy sour bread so it is dipped rather than wrapped into the wat. I found the coffee too bitter inspite of the sugar and milk put into it so I swapped it with Pop's tea. Coffee originated in Ethiopia so I guess they haven't perfected it yet during that time.:p Unlike the coffee, the tea is sweet and I haven't quite pinpointed what it tastes like. We ordered too much because the platter was meant for sharing so we had the rest as takeout.

For the movie, Pop purchased from Amazon and we watched Atletu(The Athlete), which is based from the life of Ethiopian runner Abebe Bikila. Interesting fact: he is what inspired the Bikila shoes for Vibram. The movie was a bit of an artsy fartsy documentation but one thing that you can see in the movie is Abebe's very patriotic thinking and here are several quotable quotes.

-  "I wanted the world to know that my country, Ethiopia, has always won with determination and heroism"

- "Men of success meet with tragedy. It was the will of God that I won the Olympics, and it was the will of God that I met with my accident. I accepted those victories as I accept this tragedy. I have to accept both circumstances as facts of life and live happily."

- “It took an entire Italian army to conquer Ethiopia, but only one Ethiopian soldier to conquer Rome”



Obviously since Ethiopia is famous for long distance runners so we planned to have running as our activity. Unfortunately, this was not quite possible because of Pop's foot problem so we opted for the tamer alternative: walking/jogging.

Project Fridge

The Franciscos have a new travel project. It involves sending postcards to each other and buying magnets to stick it with from the places we travelled to. Here's the first. Oh yeah!