Salty Food

Salty Food



Two nights ago we shared a cheap can of ravioli – cans of ravioli seem to be the main tinned meal in Switzerland – there’s no Irish stew or sausages and vegetables. Anyhow it was so salty that we could have used it to preserve a boatload of fish.

Last night being our last night in St Moritz and in Switzerland we decided to splurge and went to the Hotel Laudinella’s restaurant. I had eggplant and baby tomato pizza and Lena had lasagna. We shared as usual and I ended up eating lots of the lasagna. The béchamel sauce was so salty we could have used it to flavour twenty bags of peanuts.

So tonight in Como, Italy - the birthplace of pasta, the waiter of our restaurant says first thing, “Sorry we have no pasta, only pizza and antipasta”. Lena wisely ordered the salad. I being slightly confused by the plethora of choices ordered one of the pizzas without thinking which one it was. When it came it had anchovies and olives. It was so salty I could have used it to salt the earth of my enemy’s pastures.

Now I’m constipated from all that cheese. I’m getting fat from all that cheese. And best of all my blood pressure is so high that when we went for a walk in the evening in St. Moritz it was only about 5 degrees Celsius but I could have been wearing a thong swimming costume and still felt warm.

In our Como restaurant, when the bill comes it has a five euro table charge just for sitting in the restaurant, water comes bottled and costs three euros. So the bill for pizza and a salad and a bottle of water was seventeen euros. I’m not impressed by Italy so far.

Smoking

Let’s be clear. On the scale of things smokers are just above mass murderers or is that below. Either way I don’t look kindly on people potentially giving me a fatal disease.

So we’re queueing to take the funicular down the mountain in Como on a Sunday afternoon. It’s crowded. The queueing system is pretty arbitrary. A bunch of kids jumps ahead of about a hundred people by jumping over the metal barricade. No one seems to care and there is no one to stop them. There is no one controlling the process as there would of course be in Switzerland.

Behind me in the queue there’s a young couple and the guy is smoking. This is in a big crowd of people unable to escape the fumes. We move forward slowly. Now we’re on steps waiting. Below us is a plump baldy slowly pulling on one and the wind direction is taking it directly into the crowd. He considerately drops his ash into the flowerbed next to him. Above us, a fit guy in a tight t-shirt with tats on his muscles is leaning over us chaining away and he’s actually flicking the ash onto the heads of the people standing below. The German woman who is directly downwind of the baldy waves her hands at the smoke and casts a horrified look at her partner but she is the only one who seems overtly upset. Europe still loves smokers.

When the funicular arrives it’s open slather as far as how many we can fit into the car. The opposite of Switzerland again – did I mention that. We’re close to the world record for most people in a funicular. There’s a guy touching parts of me I’m used to only Lena being allowed to.