More adventures

Well i've settled a bit, and have met some more really colorful people like Ian the heavy accented Liverpool archeologist tourguide, and lots of hot young swedish language school chums. Life's not too bad. I finished my first week at work last week. My actual title is consultant. Still lots to be done but have improved the looks of the restaurant quite a bit, candles, stemware, flatware's coming, new piazza, menus on the way,etc. David the new GM from Manchester and I have done some good so far. We've upped the check average some 20% and rising and tips too. We're getting a lot of comments like "the best restaurant we've been to in Italy" from people who have been here for weeks. Repeat business from people for like 5-7 days in a row, every night. Not bad for a total of 8 days of actual work. Pretty cool. Lets not get ahead of ourselves quite yet though some background is necessary. Join me. Lets go back. Alright, not last weekend but the one before I was invited by David to come hangout in Bracciano where he lives, to get to know each other more personally. Not in a gay way alright, you filthy minded bastards. So I took the metro line A from the Termini to Valle Aurelia past the Vatican, then hopped on a train to Bracciano. A cool little town about forty clicks north of Rome on a like named lake, you got it, Lake Bracciano. A medieval castle dominates the center of town, you media whores might know it (Monica) because it's where Katie Holmes and Tom Cruise got married. Anyway it is rather lovely. I called David and he met me at the train and we walked a few blocks where I met his wife and 3 children (Sasha, Leo, and Zara) and some other friends of his from the U.K. We went to his house to watch a little Man United and see the awesome lake view from his back yard. We had some pasta for lunch, kids wildy running everywhere, with heavy British accents by the way, then met his friends and went down to the lake for swimming and a few beers. It was really nice, loads of wind and kite surfers as well as sailboats on the lake, beautiful, albeit a little windy, great for them, though, the water however felt great. We chilled and talked and I played in the water with Sasha, Davids oldest boy at about, what, ten-twelve I guess. He kept talking to me about being an adventurer and I told him some of mine, he was impressed (at least someone, eh?) so I gave him my pocket SAS survival guide, which he was glued to the rest of the day. We'd been at the lake for hours and were talking about dinner, so decided to go to a hamlet called Calcata for dinner. Off the path enough it wasn't in my guidebook. Now get online and check it out, fuckin awesome. At about 30 km from Bracciano this place is a castle on a spit jutting out in a curve of a river valley. The cliff face it's built on drops like a thousand feet straight down on three sides into the valley to the river, which you can't see hidden in the trees below, but can still hear. It is a very well preserved castle, with a narrow entranceway, about eight feet wide, with tiny up and down narrow streets that looks just like a page out of the Lord of the Rings, except that in the castle, all the little areas and nooks, are apartments and shops, restaurants, bars, and artists lofts, all in the actual castle and built in fortified town. It's pretty small, probably something like 30 apartments, and ten businesses, you can walk across it in ten minutes, but it is amazing. Its claim to fame is that supposedly Jesus' foreskin was held in the church for 500 years, only to be stolen from the Pastor's house in 1983, some claim it was the Vatican. We had a delicious dinner with some good wine, I had stewed rabbit and cornish hen, and had a great night out. After dinner we went back to Bracciano, it was late, and David his buddy and girl went to the local irish pub and exchanged stories for a few hours. It was long enough that we all got hungry again but nothing was open except for a kebab shop that was about a k and half in the opposite direction, we weren't driving and already had to walk about 2k home, so said fuck it lets go. We parted ways and saw some lights like two blocks away, David was like "I smell hamburgers!", and he did too, there was a new place that had opened up that he was unaware of so we called the others, they came back, and snacks ensued. They all had burgers, but there's nothing like a bistecca alla Fiorentino at 4 in the morning.