Doner Kebaps and Wine (but not together)

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Once again, I am very sorry I have not written in so long. This past week was normal, in the sense that I had school Monday to Saturday, I went to a Rotary meeting on Thursday night, and went out with some friends on Saturday night. I received my birthday package from my parents (a little bit late, but greatly appreciated) and I went to soccer practice a couple times. At school I also signed up to play volleyball, which I am no good at, but it will give me something to do.

Saturday after school, I decided not to go home for lunch because a few friends and I were going to be seeing a movie three hours later. I did not feel it was worth taking the bus home and then back in order to be there for an hour, so instead I ate lunch in Vicenza. Later that night my friends and I were going to go get a pizza, so I decided to get something that was not Italian for lunch – a Doner Kebap perhaps?

One of Vicenza's many Doner Kebap restaurants. They are the European equivalent of Mexican food.

This has got to be one of my proudest photographic works.

Later I killed some time in Vicenza and went to meet my friends in front of the movie theater. I probably should have gone online to read a spoiler on Inception, considering it is supposedly hard to follow even in English, but I was amazed at how well I understood. Only once did I have to ask what a certain word meant and at certain points I even found myself not noticing that the film was in Italian because of how well I understood. After that we walked around in Vicenza, and then met up with some other friends to go get a pizza. I noticed that at this place, unlike the one last week, nobody ordered the French fries pizza, so I ordered the cheese again. After that we walked around a bit longer, and then went to a bar. Unlike in the United States, a bar is not a place that serves mostly alcohol. They definitely do, but more people in the group ordered coffee or some other non-alcoholic drink than anything else. I got home late and fell asleep pretty quickly because I was so worn out from speaking Italian all day. It truly is physically exhausting to communicate completely in a different language.

Yesterday morning I woke up to an empty house. The whole family had gone to Osvaldo’s soccer game, and apparently they had come to see if I wanted to go, but I was sleeping. Once they came back, Cristina said to help Dante when he arrived. “Who’s Dante?” I thought to myself. Later he arrived and we helped him carry a contraption out of his car and into the backyard. Then we started making wine.

Here is an illustrated guide on wine making.

Step 1. Grow grapes.

Step 2: Pick grapes.

Step 3: Have your Italian host sister wash her feet and stomp the grapes.

Step 4: Have an Italian wine expert put all the stomped grapes into the cool wine-making contraption.

Step 5: Have the same Italian wine expert use his cool wine-making contraption to get the last drop out of those grapes.

Step 6: He then passes it all through a filter into this large jug. We filled about three or four of these.
Step 7: Store for about three weeks. Then filter again to remove any remaining seeds, grape skins, etc.
Step 8: Store for about  two or three months until the grapes ferment.
Step 9: Drink.

This is what the grapes look like after they have had all of their juice pumped out.

All steps of the process were done here.