Horse of a different color

By Tom Greene 
Had a bellyful of squid Wednesday morning and a bellyful of horse Wednesday night. Extreme surf and turf. The traveling market visited Cagli Wednesday and, with it, a seafood market vendor who drove a food truck on steroids. This turbo-charged masterpiece of street food disbursement unfolded using hydraulics like something out of a Transformer movie: Squidbot. Deep-fried calamari, squid, shrimp and fish were shoveled out to eager elderly ladies from the town -- and me. I learned quickly that if you don't get in a spot and get your elbows out, those ladies will cut ahead of you faster than you can say "indigestion."

The fried seafood made a great breakfast (the market closes at 1 p.m. and we had class 10:30 a.m.) I ate enough (9 euros worth) to skip lunch.

Dinner was unexpected. Someone in my group of fellow students noticed "cavallo" on the menu at the upscale restaurant we decided to try out on the recommendation of one of the professors. Cavallo is horse in English. The waitress made sure I was fully aware of this when I ordered it. I was ready. I knew what I was getting into.

Giddyup.

That's the only horse pun I'll write in this post but, believe me, there are a million of them. I think I  heard most of them that night from my fellow dinner guests. When it came out, the majority of the table tasted it and we were all in agreement that it was delicious. You'd really never know it wasn't a more conventional type of filet. I have no regrets and would happily eat it again. In fact, now that I've developed a taste for cavallo, I'm worried I might crave it in the U.S. If you see me trolling the backlots of racetracks when we get home, please, just look away.

There was an interesting scenario at the end of the meal that embodied inter-cultural dissonance. I was finishing my last glass of wine and noticed something strange in the bottom of the glass. Fishing it out, I retrieved what looked like a piece of chewed gum. We'd been pouring out of a jug of wine and I had gotten the last drop... and a little extra. I was mortified. I felt a little sick and was just generally bummed out thinking that someone in the kitchen must really hate Americans. It didn't make sense to me since everyone in the restaurant had been so friendly and the meal was one of the best I've had since I've been here. Still, I didn't want to make scene and decided to just let it go. I just wanted to pay and get out of there. The dissonance is that if this had happened in the U.S., I wouldn't have thought twice about pointing out the gum. Hell, I would have wanted a free meal out of it -- or two.

As we left, someone from our party stayed behind and decided to talk to them about the gum. He came out a few minutes later telling us that it wasn't gum and was actually a gummy material that comes from the bottles. The restaurant owner showed him how it happens sometimes. It was nothing.

I felt both relieved that it wasn't gum and embarrassed that I'd made the accusation. Since I didn't want to make a scene in a foreign country, I wasn't going to say anything and I never would have known. Lesson learned? Don't completely change who you are because you're in a foreign country. Stick to your guns. And if you fall off the horse, get back on again. (Sorry.)