Mini Hotel Asti

... such as myself. It started with home made grissinni and salami, followed by vittello tonnato: a mayonnaise based dip with capers and tuna served on top of cold slices of veal. I was encouraged to eat as much as I wanted, and dug in with gusto. The main course was beef Agnollotti with sage and Parmesan butter. The pasta so soft and tender that it was by some miracle that it was able to hold in the filling. I helped myself to two huge bowls. As I sat back in my chair, struggling to ...

... going at ten for a Euro (compare that with the prices back home!). Oranges are in season and hard to resist; a Euro will get you three kilos of the best. Plump fennel, sits next to giant unusual pumpkins, and a huge variety of greens, most of which are foreign to me.

Inside the main building the butchers are doing things the way they should be done. Silky tripe sits next to glistening livers. Chickens, with heads, and sometimes feathers, still ...

... it is perfection in every bite. Our meal is finished with a dense cake made with ricotta and lemon. A shot of a local liquor 'Mistra' is the cherry on top.

"So this is your first time in Italy?" Tanya asks "and therefore, that was your first dinner in Italy" she continues. "Well you just ate pizza in the North, so you're doing it all wrong" she laughs.
She is correct, it is wrong, you should eat pizza in Naples. But it tastes so right.

... stretch out better late than never.
We pushed on Gary carefully negotiating hairpin bends, Kev desperately looking for something to hang onto, Rich resisting the urge to hang onto Gary's seat belt for fear it would cause him to loose consciousness.
We were soon climbing the mountain again this time heading for Italy through the St Bernard Tunnel. There a change of driver with Kev back at the helm and only an hour to Turin.
We were going to make it or at least ...

We awoke in Dijon to find everything back at normal size - apart from the mini which seemed
to have shrunk despite the deminishing food mountain in the car. Much amusement was had in
the showers following the remnents of our new towels, Richard thought he had some life
threatening disese, well, thought a vital part of his anatomy due to bleeding, Kev thought
he was growing a new Goatee on his neather regions ...

... with the Germans begins. These kids were 16 to 17 (Casper, Freddy, Carlo, Anna and Hannah) and made this Amsterdam experience as good as it came out to be. The lively, hyper bunch, hailed from Berlin and collectively knew enough broken English to sustain conversation with the slowly dying Ross and Ben. My sunglasses had been perminently attached to my head for the whole day and I was starting to see things as I drifted off to sleep for micro-seconds at time ...

... t eat as much as you can as fast as you can to be happy right away. You take your time, you sit down, you talk, you eat a bit, talk some more, order some wine, wave your hands around and yell a bunch of words that all end in vowels, and then order your real meal.

Save for Naples, what I would deem as the Compton of southern Italy, these cities are beautiful and the people are classy.

LIKES

-food
-wine

-friendliness
Turin, Piedmont, Italy jeastty