Reasons one might need to go to her happy place:
1. She is getting a pap smear
2. Her kids are being super horrible, and she needs something to do while she locks herself in the bathroom and hides from them, but she has forgotten her iPad.
3. She has been dilated 9.5 centimeters for like 45 minutes and she forgot to get an epidural.
4. Sacrament meeting has run too long.
My happy place used to be a cabana chair on the beach at the Ritz Cancun, a book in one hand, a Coca Lite in the other, and nice waiters bringing me $20 bowls of guacamole all the day long. (That's where I was during the aforementioned natural labor*).
But now I've got a new happy place. And thanks to Jake, and his surreptitious photo-taking, I can share it with you:
An intimate moment in Venice between me and my panna cotta gelato.
I don't know exactly what panna cotta gelato is, but it includes caramel, and Venice knows how to do it right. Orvieto doesn't.
We got the best gelato in Venice at La Boutique del Gelato (next to the Hotel Bruno, and somewhere in the maze between St. Mark's Square and the Rialto Bridge). I mean, I can't be certain it was the best in Venice, because we only tried like 15 others. (There is an unconfirmed rumor that Jen may have had 9 scoops of gelato, from three different vendors, plus some hot chocolate, all in one 40 minutes period. The stuff of legends). But best or not, it was remarkably good. It was rough, because maps and GPS were almost useless in Venice, and our legs grew very tired, but we managed to find it three different times. I'd recommend the coconut, the pistachio, and a double scoop of nocciola (hazelnut) with chocolate. The best was the grapefruit sorbet. I can't explain to you why it was the best. But it was so good I might have cried a little.
Honorable mention in the sorbet competition goes to the strawberry at Gelateria Carroze, in Florence, right on the Arno, between the Ponte Vecchio and the Uffizi. You probly won't hate the coconut, either.
And the Tartufo gelato at Tre Scalini in Rome's Piazza Navona was nice, too, in case you were thinking Rome's gelato can't measure up.
Where is your happy place?
Is there ice cream or guacamole there?
* To clarify: I did not actually give birth on the cabana chair in Cancun. Was only there in my mind.
4 comments:
Oh, the gelato in Italy is worth the airline flight alone. There is NO COMPARISON.
I've totally been to that gelato shop, and sat on the steps behind you in the picture to eat said gelato! Yum! Good memories! We loved Rome.
I might have to plan a trip to Italy for the gelato alone. I have been to a few gelato places here that I loved, but probably only because I am a gelato virgin. I need to be able to compare it to the good stuff!
I've been to both of the places you mentioned (Venice and Florence). I dream in Gelato. Also a happy place for me is Tito's Tacos and a place in New York where I had cheese cake that changed my life (and I have no idea where I was, tragically).
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