I ordered what?

Trying local cuisine is a fundamental part of travel to a new place.  If you go to Memphis without having BBQ, Belgium without trying the chocolates, Naples without noshing on the pizza, or Mauritius without drinking the coconut tea, your experience will be woefully incomplete.  A few years back, I realized the fun in ordering or buying something without having a clue as to what it actually is.  While backpacking through Bulgaria with a friend, we bought what we assumed would be a plain piece of bread at a market.  Upon tearing into it, we discovered that it was filled with cheese.  Cheese! Brilliant!  We immediately dubbed our find "Bread Surprise" and decided that we must shop at more markets to see what else we could discover lurking inside innocent pieces of bread.  We found jams, fruit, herb concoctions, and more cheese inside our purchases as we played this game throughout the country.  We were actually rather disappointed to tear into one particular chunk of bread to find it... utterly devoid of anything extra.  Well.  How boring.  Hmph.

I tried this again recently in Paris at a nice restaurant.  Upon looking over the entrees, I decided to pick one whose description bore not a single word that I could translate.  (I don't speak a lick of French to begin with).  What did I end up with?  Scallops!  And they were fabulous.

I don't have a 100% success rate, though.  At a tiki bar in Hawaii, I once again played the food surprise game.  I saw something called "tako poki" on the menu.  There was no explanation, I found the name pretty laughable, and I immediately envisioned Homer Simpson amusing himself by constantly poking at a beef taco at a Mexican restaurant.   That vision quickly vanished when this was placed in front of me:

WTF is that and why did the chef forget to cook it?  Seriously.  Waitress...?  I think my dinner is trying to crawl out of the bowl...?

It turns out that tako poki is marinated octopus.  I like to consider myself a decently adventurous eater, but the tako poki won this battle.  The dish was rather tentacle-heavy, and I would have been able to stomach more of it had the tentacles not been so, well, tentacle-y.  Thank God for that Mai Tai that I ordered.  At least I could have a liquid dinner.  Bottoms up!

Crazy Italians and scary Jesus

Italy's Amalfi Coast is a beautiful, majestic, awe-inspiring place.  Beautiful beaches + dramatic mountains + Italian food = awesomesauce.  It's a blissful alternate universe... until the local nutcase shows up at your cafe.

I've sung twice now with the Amalfi Coast Music Festival based out of Vietri sul Mare, one of the small, non-touristy towns in the region.  Festival singers and staff all stay at a fabulous hotel on a cliff overlooking the water, rehearse during the day, perform in the evening, then sit at a cafe drinking wine until the wee hours.  That's right, this does not suck - at all.

One evening out after a concert in Vietri, a local came to the cafe that we had nearly taken over.  Now Italians are known for their impeccable fashion, but this guy truly stood out.  I gathered the courage (or perhaps had enough liquid courage) to ask if I could take his picture.  He was more than happy to pose!

Check out my shoes, yo!

He was a little too happy to pose, actually.  After taking the above shot, he gestured at me to wait.  He started unbuttoning his shirt.  I said "Oh $&*%" under my breath.  There's a crazy Italian man in girly shoes stripping for me - in public.  He pulled his shirt off his shoulder and turned around to show me... the ugliest tattoo of Jesus I've ever seen.  He leaned over his fugly Jesus shoulder to look at me and said, "Jesus.  Numero uno.  Numero uno!"  So, of course, I took a picture of his tattoo.  Judge it for yourself:

I imagine this is what Jesus would look like if he went off the deep end and joined MS-13.  While I find the tattoo slightly disturbing, this guy cracked me up to no end.  What often makes travel so rewarding to me is the people that I happen to meet, even if they seem to have a few screws loose.