Goodbye, Forever

Travel stories are going to be a bit out of order now, I guess, as I'm just writing them as I remember them. We went to a restaurant in Rome, and I noticed that they had tartufo on their menu. Tartufo is Italian for truffle, but it also refers to a frozen dessert which is traditionally a ball of one flavour of ice-cream, inside a ball of another flavour, sometimes coated in chocolate and/or with a cherry in the middle. The one we got at the first restaurant was interesting, but didn't have the chocolate shell and flavour inside flavour that I wanted to see.

Don't get me wrong, it was still delicious, as it was chocolate and vanilla ice-cream, with a liquid chocolate center. But I wanted to try "the real thing". So I looked up the best place to get one in Rome, and a lot of reviews were saying Tre Scalini in Piazza Navona, which this blog nicely sums up about the "Tartufo Wars".

In particular, note that there's the "fake" one right next door. Which seems to have been forced to change their name, though they still have the "date' to make it look like they're the older one, even though if you look closely, it's just a number at the end of the name of their restaurant, and not actually the year that they started in.

This one below is the real one.

The truffle itself was good, very rich, so it really needed that giant heap of whipped cream on top. Also, if you do decide to go, as pointed out by the blog I linked, get the tartufo take-away! I think it was about 6 Euros take-away, and 12 if you decided to get a table and eat it there.

In preparation for going to Italy, and while were were there, I had been doing Duolingo whenever I had some spare time and WiFi access, so I had picked up some phrases. However, Duolingo doesn't really give you context on when certain phrases are appropriate. For instance, in French, there's bonjour and bonsoir for good morning/afternoon and good evening, respectively. I didn't really understand when the cutoff was to change from jour to soir, so I got into the habit of just repeating whichever one someone else said to me. I remembered learning buongiorno (good morning), buon pomeriggio (good afternoon) and buona sera (good evening) in high school Italian, but the teacher never really explained the cutoffs, so I retained the same habit when we got to Italy.

At Tre Scalini, after paying for the tartufo, the guy said to me, "A domani!" to which I replied out of habit, "A domani!" as I began walking out. But then I remembered that a domani translates to, "See you tomorrow!", and we were not going to return to this store tomorrow, as we were going to Naples and then leaving Italy. I wasn't going to be seeing him tomorrow! So I turned back around and said, "No! (awkward pause while I tried to think of what to say next) Ciao!"

Or as Grad Daniel translates it:

Tartufo guy: See you tomorrow!
Me: See you tomorrow!
(pause)
Me: No! GOODBYE FOREVER!

I'm contributing to the bad impression tourists have. =(