JULES: Okay now, tell me about the WiFi.
VINCENT: What so you want to know?
JULES: Well, WiFi is WEP-free there, right?
VINCENT: Yeah, it's WEP-free, but is ain't a hundred percent free. I mean you can't walk into a hotel, open your notebook, and start bloggin' away. You've still got to buy access, but your signal isn't secure unless you're wired into the wall in your home or certain designated places.
JULES: Do they use RJ-45s?
VINCENT: Yeah, it breaks down like this: You buy access and they give you a receipt, which has a userid and password that are both random alphanumerics eight characters long. Your browser is rerouted to a login screen when you open it, and you've got to enter the codes. Then you're online, unless you use Firefox, which doesn't play nice with the hotel hijinx. That said, Safari works great!
JULES: That did it, man -- I'm fuckin' goin', that's all there is to it.
VINCENT: You'll dig it the most. But you know what the funniest thing about Trentino Alto Adige is?
JULES: What?
VINCENT: It's the little differences. A lotta the same shit you got in other areas of Italy, they got there, but there they're a little different.
JULES: Examples?VINCENT: Well, in Trento, you can buy a beer in a pizzeria and walk out onto the street with it, drinking as you walk. And I don't mean a Moretti either. I mean a half-liter bottle of Franziskaner. Also, you know what they call a cheese slice in Italy?
JULES: They don't call it a cheese slice?
VINCENT: No, they speak Italian, dipshit. They wouldn't know what the fuck a "cheese slice" is.
JULES: What'd they call it?
VINCENT: Margherita
JULES: (repeating) Margherita. What'd they call prosciutto?
VINCENT: Prosciutto is prosciutto, but they eat speck more often, or add it to canederli or strangolapreti
JULES: What do they call marinara?
VINCENT: I dunno, I was on the Adige, not the Amalfi coast. But you know what they put on french fries in Trentino Aldo-Adige of ketchup?
JULES: Mayonnaise?
VINCENT: How did you know?
JULES: Well, I did see Pulp Fiction, and kind of extrapolated, since Trento is not too far from Austria.
May 11, 2008
Just a little different
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3 comments:
I still remember margherita! And if you wanted your sauce to have any spice at all, you had to order it, and the basil comes on top of the cheese. And if you pick up the slice and eat it they look at you funny.
I almost always ordered it with funghi, since I knew for sure what that was and it's my favorite anyway.
After all this time, a few Italian words still float around in the ol' noggin for whatever reason, and almost all the ones that stuck related to FOOD. (Like fragola, because it seemed so weird.) Shows how I work I guess.
Come to think of it, whenever I talk about that trip the stories center around the food. The twice-daily stops for gelato. Trying to order Chinese food from a menu that's in Italian and Chinese - no English. A toasted sandwich I ate while I walked in Venice. Coconut from the fountain thingy. Horrible hotel food for dinner every night until the very last night, when some blessed person thought to feed us risotto alla Milanese.
Gosh, it was even about this time of year. Now I'm all nostalgic. Some day I intend on dragging Phil there, too.
Gelato only twice daily? You were better than me!
Not really. The rest of the time was spent eating pastries.
One morning my roomie and I got up kind of late (in Milan we weren't on a particular schedule one day) and had missed breakfast and we ate a huge heap of pastries on the way into the city. WAY better than the bread/butter/tea stuff we'd been fed most days (free or not).
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