Farewell Dinner

Everyone is leaving either tonight or tomorrow morning. When I left my apartment this evening my roommates were getting all their stuff ready. They leave tonight for Paris. It's all quite sad. Thank goodness I get to spend all weekend with Nora in Rome. It's going to be fun.
So tonight was the farewell dinner, and everyone was supposed to meet at the Strozzi Campus at 7:00 so I went up a little early hoping to catch my mom, dad, Jess or John on Skype, because I wouldn't be on later tonight like I had said. Well I had emails from Jess and my mom and to my surprise I was able to talk to John. (I distracted him from work for a little hehe...sorry Dave). :]
So 7:00 comes around an no one is there so we call the other campus and they tell us it's not until 7:15 but Marina is running a few minutes late, so we hang out a little longer and then go back downstairs to meet everyone. Everyone...riiiight. the only person we see downstairs is Marina (Santa Reparata Housing Director) and she say we're going to wait a little longer to see if people are running late too, but I'm standing there thinking it's just gonna be the four of us (Nora, Missy, Kathryn and me) and our Santa Reparata Directors. A little awkward we're all thinking. So after a while we head off for the restaurant (yay I'm so hungry). Finally we get there, Marina and Rebecca were walking painfully slow. Haha. They probably didn't walk that slow but Nora and I were starved so it seemed like forever. The place was so cute though and really nice. We walked in and went downstairs to a neat little seating area which Nora and I could only call authentic. Sitting at our table already were Rebecca's parents (the owners of SR). Hmmm...
Once we were all seated Rebecca explained that this was a traditional Renaissance meal, which is apparently the specialty of the chef at this restaurant and a very special treat because he doesn't do it very often.
So first dinner started out with us tasting some wine. (I love it already! Haha). It was a copper colored sweet "white" wine. Very good. There were very few bottles of it made. (They told us how many...I definitely forgot that number). The chef only spoke Italian so Rebecca kept trying to translate for us. I caught some of what he was saying! YAY! Go me! After we had all tasted the wine and approved, I guess, he brought out more and with that Crustinis. Three different types: an olive spread, a chicken liver spread and (my fav) a peppers spread. They were all good. Not a huge fan of the olive one (Kirssy is crying a little right now) and the chicken liver one was interesting. I'm glad I tried it though. Next on the menu (omg did I mention how HUGE this meal was) was the pasta dishes. Linguine with a mixture of flavors I would have never in my life put together, I don't remember all of them but I know brown sugar was one of them. And ravioli filled with Picorela cheese in a duck sauce. That one was by far my favorite of the pastas.
Oh wait...there is more. Two "main" dishes came. Veal meatloaf (the chef is shuddering at my use of that word) with peaches and a Beef something with apples and pears. With that we had a red wine, that I didn't like that much. Then of course there were a million different things for dessert too..
Of course we needed a different wine for this portion of the meal. :] We were served a sweet dessert wine-liqueur in what looked like shot glasses. Next a mixture of fresh fruits, which had kiwi in it!! Yum! And finally finishing the (HUGE) meal was a sort of ice cream something with chocolate sauce.
I mean this meal was amazing, but so big!
And dinner wasn't nearly as awkward as we thought it would be. It was kind of fun. I think we learned a lot.
Well Rome in the morning. Sleep time.