I treated myself to some pistachio gelato the other day. It made me remember the last time I ate some: Italy.
We had been up to catch a 6:15 AM (!) train from Milan to Florence. Now we had arrived in Milan the night before at 10:30 PM - upon which we walked a half hour to our hotel, walked back to the train station to find food, then walked back. As you can see, this high math leads us to getting in bed at 2 am or so. Yes, we were tired on that train ride. But as soon as we got to Florence, we hit the streets and saw as much as we could.
Now, imagine it is getting later and later as night has fallen. Once again, we have put off food (the theme of our trip: no real meal just treats to save time). On my list of things I wanted to do was get some gelato in Florence. So we wandered around to find the famous and best place in Florence. There was much stopping on dark corners and iPhone-ing to find this place. We finally found it in a quiet part of town - and low and behold it is closed for the season. It re-opened in 2 days. We were leaving the next morning. Figures.
We finally settled down around 9:30/10 pm and found a place to eat dinner - we were proud of ourselves. But wait! We still were gelato-less. So again the search began for a place that was open until midnight. We went back to the busy part of town, now quiet, and saw one little gelato place still open. Nick ordered for us chocolate and pistachio to share while I sat down. Comes to find out, you have to pay more to sit down. So I got up.
We headed back out into the brisk, no, cold air and ate our gelato in a zombie-like stupor as we walked back to our hotel, all in hopes it didn't lock us out for the night.
All that for a little gelato. But guess what. It was delicious.