Episode 66: How to Visit the Continent

A decade or so ago, I was really lucky to get to go to Italy for three weeks. I went with some friends - Beth, Thom and Giles - who were all far more well-travelled than me and when the plane landed in Milan I was almost electric with excitement. So of course, I was one of only two or three people pulled out of line to be frisked, touched, searched and almost danced with. These jackbooted fascists opened up my luggage and went through every single pair of my boxer briefs. They opened up the box of Breathe Right strips and made me demonstrate how they worked. They asked me if my friends smoked pot. And they did all of this in Italian which despite what you probably think sounds very accusatory, so I of course said "yes!" to everything. Luckily (eh, for my friends), "yes" was a word they didn't seem to know. So after about an hour of stress and frantic worrying about what prison I was going to end up in, they let me go and we then went by bus and train and train and train to Alba, home of the white truffle, where we eight some hilarious eight-thousand dollar meal that was worth every penny. I still don't know how they got that sliver of truffle into the middle of that egg yolk.

Three weeks later, Beth and Thom and I sat in the middle of a McDonalds in Venice, proclaiming the Filet-o-Fish to be the best single recipe ever invented, a judgement I still stand by.