It's "Caffè". Not "Coffee". Stupid American.

Editor's Note: Ha! I called myself the editor...I'm awesome. Anyway, we have our very first guest post today, courtesy of the little woman. I promised this was coming a couple of weeks ago, but she didn't get around to writing it for the crappy excuse of having an actual life to lead. Oh well. Enjoy some estrogen-laced ranting!

So, as all two of you know, the Grump and I were lucky enough to travel to Florence (Italy not New Jersey) for our honeymoon. It was an amazing trip and I'm sure you guys have kept up with the hub's posts concerning our awesome time there. While most of the things that the Grump saw as major enjoyment roadblocks (like not knowing the language...oh, wah) I simply ignored as I most likely had a glass of chianti in hand at the time. However, as a coffee drinker, my honeymoon buzz was nearly disrupted by the lack of a decent cup of joe anywhere in the country.

I started drinking coffee in college, mostly just to get going for my 10:00 a.m. classes. God, I miss college. Anyway, I was introduced to coffee through the roach trucks on campus.

Mmm.Grease.

This is coffee that had been brewing for about three days before the cup was shoved into your hand by Vlad, who may or may not be a convicted felon in the old country. Zombie-like, you totter the first few feet towards your class while taking your first tongue scalding sip. What happens internally is only what I can describe as a Van Damme kick to your frontal cortex, tongue and vital organs. Externally, for me anyway, it looks and sounds something like this:

Needlessly to say, I reached the point where this kung fu showdown with my early morning brain function is something that I now require to start off my day. So, imagine my surprise when I asked for a coffee in Italy and the waiter plunked this down in front of me:

"I feel like I'm gonna break this damned thing."

I know what you guys are thinking. "Mrs.Grump, (because you guys are polite) that appears to be an espresso. Coffee-zilla. Even for an addict like yourself, it should be more than sufficient to satisfy your coffee jones." Well, Grumpites, it's not. I like to enjoy my caffeine buzz. Savor it, if you will. And I just can't do that when there's only a quarter of an inch of metallic tasting liquid with an entire pack of sugar thrown in.

Puzzled, I consulted my trusty Frommer's. Skipping past the potential set up they give you for being roofied by someone named Gio the second you step into a bar, "caffè" is listed as the Italian word for coffee....and espresso. Seriously? So a couple of days and almost one full espresso cup later, I overhear a table of French tourists ordering a "caffè americano". I know, right? The last group you would think would order anything "americano". So I give that a whirl and I'm given a cup of something that was quite obviously espresso watered down with the spit of the cafe waiters. Ugh. Good thing it's socially acceptable to order wine at eleven in the morning on a Tuesday here, otherwise there would be dead bodies littering the piazza.

So to bring this rambling post to a conclusion, my coffee confusion was cleared up about a month later when I stumbled upon this post by The Oatmeal, who I absolutely love and am also a little afraid of. While I don't agree with his assessment of the whole Italian/American coffee situation (Espresso with or without water blows goats either way in the categories of taste and strength), I'd recommend reading it before you venture off into the land of Italy. Or just have a backup cup of diner coffee waiting for you like I did when you land.

The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 8, or Random Thoughts On Italy

OK, so as it turns out I didn't have enough material for 10 days of posting. I don't think 8 days is too shabby, however. As I don't really have any topics worthy of a full post, I'll just share a few things that have been rattling around in my head since I got back:

• I don't fly well. I guess I never noticed this because I'd never been on a plane for 10 hours before. But I can really be quite the bastard at the end of a flight. I blame this on my family's problem of having really bad ears when it comes to pressure changes. While I know that a popping sensation in one's ears is normal during airline travel, I don't think it's normal to feel like someone stuck a screwdriver in my ear hours after I got off the fucking plane. So I must admit, by the time I get off the actual plane, I'm less than cordial, even to my lovely wife. Sorry baby.
  

• Airline policies suck ass. I may be a prick when I fly, but I refuse to take all of the blame. If you're not supposed to bring meat products back from other countries, then that information should be readily available to read BEFORE you've purchased almost 50 bucks worth of Italian salami and gotten it 90% of the way through U.S. customs. Not to mention that this was after about 14 hours worth of going through inefficient security stations and boarding procedures. I think what gets me the most pissed off about airlines is that their security is reactionary. Perhaps if these schmucks would think far enough ahead to create some kind of technology that's flexible enough to catch the crap that they didn't think of before, then they wouldn't have to update their carry-on policies every five minutes. Oh, someone managed to put a bomb in a shoe? Then you'll have to take yours off and put it through the x-ray machine every time you fly. Someone made a bomb out of liquid?
  Then you can only have less than 3 ounces on the plane from now on. I'd hate to see what would happen if someone managed to plant a bomb in one of his testicles. I'm picturing a small guillotine next to the metal detector.

• We must be actively trying to become obese in the U.S. I spent ten days in Italy, making absolutely no attempt to watch what I ate. Yet somehow, I managed to lose two pounds. That's not much, I know, but considering I ate enough prosciutto to risk a swine shortage in the Chianti region, I should be about 300 pounds by now. I don't know what we're putting in our food here, but we should seriously look into switching to what they're having. Although, my weight loss may also have been due to the fact that everything in the Chianti region is at least at a 30 degree incline. It's unreal. I always laughed when an elderly person would say they had to walk uphill both ways to get to school everyday. But now I realized they weren't full of shit if they grew up in Italy.

• Being worried about acting like a stereotypical arrogant American while traveling abroad is the most surefire way of acting like a stereotypical arrogant American while traveling abroad. I so didn't want to be that guy. But within a day of arriving at our hotel I managed to call the guy working the counter "Matt" about 13 times before I realized his name was Andreas. And I managed to pull off the ever-helpful language barrier busting technique of yelling things slowly and obnoxiously in English. Because, after all, anyone should be able to understand English as long as you speak it to them as if they are a deaf child. Shockingly, I don't think I turned into the hotel's favorite guest. My natural reaction to this suspicion was to think they were the assholes, because anyone who doesn't think I'm awesome is clearly a douche bag.
  

• The final conclusion that I pull from everything I've posted about this trip is pretty simple. I am one lucky guy to be married to Mrs. Grump. I'd imagine that traveling with me is similar to going on vacation with an ill-tempered gorilla that can form basic sentences. Yet even so, Mrs. Grump made sure we had an excellent honeymoon. We saw sights that I'd probably only ever see on a computer screen if left to my own devices. I ate food that makes me tear up a little bit just to think about it (On a side note, if you ever have a chance to eat food that has wild boar in it, do it. Don't think about it. Just do it). I even managed to pick up a phrases of Italian. I think my favorite was "due." It's nothing special. It just means "two." But it was the word I used the most often because anything I ordered or purchased was always in duplicate to accommodate my new wife. And that makes me happy.

Speaking of the wife, stay tuned for a special guest post sometime next week from Mrs. Grump herself. I don't drink coffee, but according to Mrs. Grump, anything good you've heard about Italian coffee is a bold-faced lie. Check in sometime next week to find out why.

The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 7, or Gotthard Is The Best Swiss Band In Italy

Yes, yes. I know I missed yesterday's Italy post. Cut me some slack work has been a pain in the ass. Actually it's pretty delusional of me to think that anyone even noticed that I missed a day, but that's not the point. It's the principle of the thing. Unfortunately, work has been giving me a healthy kick in the pills for the last couple of days so I haven't gotten around to doing anything productive since yesterday morning.

Anyway, midway through our trip Mrs. Grump and I had go to the local laundromat to wash our clothes because we didn't feel like lugging ten days worth of clothes with us over to Italy. While at the laundromat we were passing the time by making fun of the crappy Italian music videos that were playing on the TV, which was made even funnier by the fact that there was no sound. Next time you're watching your very favorite band in a music video, try turning the sound off. Without fail it will be the dumbest fucking thing you've ever seen.

One video, however, was so awful that I had to see if I could find it on YouTube when I got back to the apartment. Fortunately for everyone in the world, I was able to find it. It's actually a Swiss band called Gotthard, who named themselves after both a mountain pass and the act of pitching a tent. Pun: accomplished.

Alright, I've kept you from this long enough. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you "Unconditional Faith."



I just don't know where to begin, here. I think I'll go with pointing out the mandolin player. What about him? Well, basically just the fact that he exists. There is a grown man in the middle of a rock band playing an itty bitty guitar. And he's rocking that shit.

Also, can anyone tell me where the story of the boxer is supposed to go? He's training, he wins a fight, and he goes back home to his wife. I mean, that's lovely and all, but is there a point? Or are we just going for a surrealistic depiction of a white guy beating a black guy in a boxing match?

I think what I like best about this video is that it actually got worse when I was able to watch it with sound, it actually got worse. And it's not just that the song is bad. Well, yeah it is bad. But when you watch that music video while it plays with that song, you get an entity that transcends itself and evolves into art on par with Plan 9 from Outer Space.

Sadly, the lead singer of Gotthard, Steve Lee, recently died in a motorcycle accident. That really is a bummer, and I will take the high road for perhaps the first time in my life and not make a joke about it. In fact, I better just end this post now before I wind up accidentally saying something that makes me look like a complete dick.

The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 6, or The Devil Is A Pigeon In Florence

I'm not going to lie to you. This pigeon kind of scared the shit out of me. Mrs. Grump and I found this guy perched on a statue outside of the Uffizi Gallery, and he really did not seem to be happy to share the same air as us ground dwellers. At first he just looked like he was part of the statue, because he did not move. At all. But then I realized that nothing on the statue seemed as evil as that little fucker.

And since when did pigeons have the ability to retract their heads into their necks, thereby turning themselves into a demonic, uncircumcised penis? Although, maybe my looking at a pigeon and seeing a dick says more about me than it does the bird.

Phallic illusions aside, I still had trouble taking this guy's picture. Seeing him through the digital display of the camera made him seem a lot closer to me than I was comfortable with. I was expecting to take the camera away and find him only inches away from my face, ready to murder and devour me in front of hundreds of people. Fortunately, I was able to escape with my life and fly home to Philly where the pigeons aren't demonic. They're just assholes.

The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 5, or Grappa Is Italian For Poison

OK, so grappa is not really poison. It's just an after dinner drink that they serve in Italy. Wikipedia describes it as a "fragrant, grape-based pomace brandy" but I don't think that's really true either. Sure, it looks harmless enough...

Grappa (the shot glass to the right) just looks like a little shot glass filled with water. I tried to tell the waitress that I don't drink, but she spoke very little English and I wasn't about to give her the "no wanto to be an alcoholico" treatment. So when she gave me a free grappa with what turned out to be a limoncello chaser, I just smiled and said thank you. It being a small restaurant, I felt obligated to at least investigate the drink lest she watch me casually discard it off to the side of the table.

Well, the limoncello smelled strong, but pleasant. The grappa, however, smelled like someone misplaced their shot of rubbing alcohol. Later we came to find out that's because Grappa is like 40% alcohol. Jesus, I think I'd be better off drinking the rubbing alcohol.

Needless to say, not being a drinker I decided to let the waitress be offended if need be because I was not going to touch the grappa. I did down the limoncello, however, which lead to this...

The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 4, or Cocks Are Big In Italy

Today's title is wordplay at it's finest, folks. First, the innocent layer: Mrs. Grump and I stayed in the town of Greve, whose official emblem is the black cock. In this instance, cock is just a rooster, plenty of which can be found around town.

You can't miss my gate. It's the one with the big, black cock on it.

Cock a doodle doo, indeed.....right?

Don't trust any wine that doesn't have a black cock right on the label.

I have to say I'd be very interested in seeing how the town would look if black cock took on the other meaning, especially considering that black stereotypes are alive and well in Italy...

That actually may be the most obscene picture that I show you today. And that's including the next pictures that prove that roosters aren't the only kind of popular cock in the area.

Can anyone please explain this sculpture to me in a way that doesn't include a man being forced to wear a Trojan War Helmet at clubpoint?

Insert joke about giving head here.

Pretty much everything about this statue deeply disturbs me.

So, like I said, cocks are big in Italy. But wait! There is also a delightful layer of irony in that sentence. If you notice, in terms of proportion, all of the cocks in the above examples are actually quite small. Mrs. Grump informed me that this was due to artists of the time feeling that a long ding dong would be in bad taste. So, it's cool for a dude to hold a severed head while in the nude, just as long as his winky isn't taking up too much space. Michelangelo's "David" is another good example of that mindset, but Mrs. Grump didn't get any pictures of little David. I guess she was trying to keep some semblance of scruples for our photo album.

Hm...never mind, then.

The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 3, or Even The Delinquents Are More Cultured In Italy

Ha! You thought I was going to skip today. Well I just had to wait until Mrs. Grump hooked me up with the rest of the honeymoon pics so I'd have some visual aids. Speaking of pics, it turns out the wife took 350 of the damn things during our trip. I'll have a few collections to show you, but there are a few in particular that I'd like to share.

Get a load at the ornate decoration here. It's obvious that this structure was pretty important to make the artist put so much care and attention to detail into it.

Or maybe it was just a fucking lamp post.

This is just plain awesome, especially when you consider this turtle is the base of a simple set of bars covering someone's window. I've been to Camden, NJ, where there are entire blocks of houses with bars covering any opening. But you won't find turtle one on any of them. Not even a frog. I think Camden would be in much better shape if their protecting window bars had adorable little animals on them.
OK...this is beautiful work, but it really depressed me when I realized it was graffiti. Mrs. Grump and I found it on a construction barrier in Florence, and it makes me ashamed of how we do graffiti in the States. We're lucky if the cock and balls drawn in Sharpie on the bathroom stall are realistic enough to include pubic hair.

Stay tuned for some examples of what happens when Italians actually get serious with their art. Marble, granite, and poorly-endowed, naked men will abound!

The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 2, or Too Fat For A Fiat

Lufthansa's thoughtful wedding gift aside, there was a lot to be excited about once we got to Italy. Mrs. Grump and I had a full itinerary of things to see and do for our 10 days in Chianti/Florence. One of those things was a tour of Florence. But not just any tour. Mrs. Grump found a company called the Fiat 500 Touring Club. The premise here is that each group gets its own Fiat to drive as part of a convoy that tours Florence and eventually makes its way to a winery just outside of the city. Sounds fun right?

The catch here is that the cars are stick shift, and do not even have the technology that standard cars have that allows you to shift directly from one gear to another. No, I had to learn (in about 20 minutes) a technique called double clutching, which basically means twice the work for the same effect as a modern car. Oh, and I have to do all of this in a car built in 1964 that was made for a small European man/woman. So to recap: I'm expected to drive a matchbox car with antiquated technology through a foreign city that I've never even seen before. Let's go to the pictures, shall we?

The weather report said it was supposed to be sunny all day. It's comforting to know that Italian meteorologists are as full of shit as Americans. Also, note that this may have been the widest road in all of Florence.

Another shot of the back of one of our fellow Fiats. This was probably 99% of my sightseeing experience, lest I accidentally hit a squirrel and total our car. Actually, I came within about 3 inches of running over a little old Italian guy who was crossing at a crosswalk. Sure, any way you slice it he had the right away, but that would mean I'd have to come to a stop and then start a car that I'd spent the last 10 minutes stalling out just to get started. Needless to say I was willing to let this guy take one for the team.

Here we are parked outside the winery where Mrs. Grump got to do a tasting and I got to get my heart rate back down under 100 beats per minute. I like how our Fiats make the Volkswagon bug on the left look like a frigging Hummer. Honestly, though, all whining aside, it was at this point in the trip that I really started to enjoy myself. I'd gotten a handle on the car and now we got to see how wine is made by some of the best in the world. I don't even drink but it was really interesting to learn about the process, and how people rate wine beyond saying "This is great" or "This tastes like piss."

The best news of the day was that when we left the winery, the rain had stopped and we could actually stop to take a gander at some of the sights. Here we are parked in our little convoy near an overlook of Florence. I think, if necessary, our group could have easily taken on the Hell's Angels.

Even if everything else had been a complete disaster, this view would have made the whole trip worth it.


And here we have one last picture of me. Note that my head is in fact looming above the sunroof. When the cover was on it looked like a scene from Harry and the Hendersons. And in case you're wondering, due to my paranoia that one of the 3 people who read this blog will somehow affect my professional career should I include my actual identiy, any picture of my face will be replaced with Taylor Hicks. Why Taylor Hicks? Because for the last 3 months or so, I've been told that I look like Taylor Hicks by Mrs. Grump's family, the bartender at my wedding, and a couple that we had just fucking met during our honeymoon. Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go kill myself.

The Grumps' Italian Adventure: Day 1, or Kiss Mein Weinershniztel Lufthansa

As promised last Thursday, I'll be spending every weekday for the next two weeks covering my honeymoon with the newly minted wife to the Chianti region of Italy. To be honest, I'm not exactly sure where I'm going with this yet. I've been given specific instructions by Mrs. Grump not to just bitch and moan about everything, so I guess I'll just give some this and that about the sights, some of the stories....and fuck it there will also be a lot of complaining.

Today's post, in fact, will be a heavy dose of venting at the sauerkraut slurping assholes at Lufthansa Airlines. And before you say anything, yes, I'm well aware that ranting about airlines is about as fresh as a knock knock joke. But I'll be damned if ever single complaint ever said, written, or sung about the airline industry isn't one hundred percent justified.

These polesmokers at Lufthansa are responsible for taking a trip that had been relatively smooth and taking a nice healthy scheize all over it. We flew out of Philly, but had a two hour layover in Frankfurt, Germany. As we boarded the bus that would shuttle us to our connecting plane to Florence, we realized something was wrong when the fully loaded bus sat motionless for about 20 minutes. Our suspicions were confirmed when we were told that the pilot for our flight was sick, and that we had to return to the terminal while other arrangements were made.

Well, apparently the "other arrangements" were for the entire flight to go fuck themselves. They just canceled the damn thing, and told us that a portion of the passengers would get the remaining seats on the next flight to Florence. Well, in another piece of good news, it turns out that Mrs. Grump had been included in the next flight but I had not. That's all I need. Mrs. Grump goes to Florence by herself where she's surrounded by gorgeous, olive-skinned men with sexy accents. No dice.

So I mention this foul up to the workers at the gate, but they tell me they don't have any control over who gets chosen for the next flight. They did seem to have the authority however, to rip up Mrs. Grump's ticket right in front of me when they realized she would not be going without me.

So our next move was to get our tickets transferred to a flight four hours later that would take us to Bologna, Italy. And since Lufthansa really goes the extra mile, they agreed to get us the rest of the way to Florence by bus.

But we couldn't get the tickets from the people at the gate, which I found odd considering they just gave tickets to all the people who got on the next Florence flight. We had to take a journey that literally had us go through customs three fucking times just to get a new boarding pass for the flight to Bologna. To put that in perspective, we didn't go through customs a single goddamn time when we got to the Bologna airport.

What the fuck, Germany? You are the country that brought us Mercedes, BMW, and, uh....less pleasant forms of meticulous planning and efficiency, but you can't even think far enough ahead to have a pilot on call for the days when the scheduled pilot couldn't keep his fucking hands off the Beck's and Jagermeister the night before? Or, failing that, perhaps you could hire employees that don't react to unexpected problems by turning into quivering piles of fucking stupid. Congratulations, Lufthansa. You really set the tone for our honeymoon by making my wife cry and giving me a migraine. Danke schoen, you bunch of pricks.

Excuse Me, Can You Tell Me How To Get To The Sexy Time?

This may very well be my last post for the rest of the month. I've only got 6 more days until I've officially tricked Mrs. Grump-to-be into marrying me, and there is much to be done until then. After that, I've got ten days of Italiantastic adventures planned for the honeymoon.

One of the things we did today to get ready for the trip was to pick up a copy of Frommer's Italian PhraseFinder and Dictionary. We may look like douchey tourists with it, but I think it's a small price to pay to be able to phonetically stumble through phrases like "Do you know English?" and "We don't know Italian."

After a bit of studying, however, I've come to realize that the people at Frommer's know that people don't just go on family vacations or school trips to Italy. They also realize that some people go to Italy for the same reason that anyone goes anywhere: to find themselves a nice piece of ass. Tucked in between the "Golfing" and "Casino" sections is a category entitled "Nightclubbing." But I'm pretty sure they should have just called it "One Night Stands." Here is a sample conversation you studly fellas can have with the pretty ladies of Italy based on phrases learned in the Frommer's guide:

Stud:Mi scusi, posso offrirle qualcosa da bere?
Excuse me, may I buy you a drink?

Bella: Si.
Yes.

Stud: Che begli occhi che ha!
You have nice eyes.

Bella: Grazie.
Thank you.

(Cut to Stud's place)

Stud: Sei bellisima. Vuoi entrare?
You are beautiful. Would you like to come in?

Bella: Sei bellisimo....si.
You are handsome...yes.

(Cut to Stud's bedroom)

Stud: Vuoi che ti massagi la schiena?
Would you like a massage?

Bella: No, per favore, non farlo...hai un preservativo?
Please don't do that...do you have a condom?

Stud: Ho un preservato. Prendi la pillola?
I have a condom. Are you on birth control?

(30 seconds later)

Stud: Li?
There?

Bella: No, non cosi.
That's not it.

(15 seconds later)

Bella: Li...piu veloce...piu profondo.
There...faster...deeper.

Stud: Piano! Piu lento!
Easy! Slower!

(5 seconds later)

Stud: Stai qui, ti preparo la colazione.
Stay, I'll make you breakfast.

Bella: Credo che questo sia stato un errore.
I think this was a mistake.

Fortunately for me, I'll have Mrs. Grump to disappoint in my own language. My only worry is that with intimate phrases included in our translation guide, a few errors could lead to something like this:



Enjoy the rest of your October, folks.