Spacca Napoli

Last weekend my friend Gabi came out to Chicago to visit me, and for the entire month prior to her arrival I got at least three texts a day discussing where she wanted to eat. By the time she got here the list was so long we figured we were going to have to eat 17 full meals a day for three days, with bakery breaks in between. Instead, we ended up going to the same pizza restaurant three nights in a row. There's this place that makes these thin Italian style pizzas that are so good it's like they have all your hopes and dreams baked into them. Apparently the owner only uses Italian wood burning ovens, and Italian flour he has shipped out from his grandma's farm in Italy where she culls the wheat herself, and then knits a quilt to wrap around each package of flour so it'll stay warm for the flight. Or something like that.

So, Gabi gets off the plane and she's hungry so we hop in a cab and go straight to the restaurant complete with luggage, and enormously oversized pillow she refuses to travel without. (except! for the time we visited Bub in Italy and Gabi decided to leave her pillow there so that she could fit Special K with strawberries cereal boxes into her suitcase, because she was convinced they wouldn't have them in the U.S. "But I can just buy a new pillow!" she screamed. This may be a whole other story for a different blog.) We get there and they ask us if we're moving in. Kind of, we say. It's not until the end of the weekend, when we're walking in and high-fiving the bus boys, that they realize we weren't kidding.

Anyway, we were so excited that first night to be eating pizza together that we got two bottles of wine. That's one bottle a piece too many it turns out. Stuffed and hammered, we decided to get a cab home but for some reason couldn't find one, so we just started walking and wheeling Gabi's suitcase down a major street, in the rain. For some reason we decide the clicking of the wheels on her bag down the sidewalk is making an amazing beat so I start doing a little butt-shaking dance, which then led to Gabi dropping her bag and running to the flag pole in front of the hospital we'd been walking past to do an impromptu pole dance, which was really just her swinging around once and then falling to the ground while I screamed, "You stopped my beat!"

Luckily, a cab pulled over at this point. We jumped in and I pointed dead ahead, proclaiming, "To Home!", Gabi high-fived me and we buckled up while the driver continued to stare at us as we giggled and high-fived for a good 2 minutes before he said, "Where do you live?" Slightly embarrassed, I gave him my address and two blocks later we were there.

Once at home Gabi and I immediately changed into our pjs, and then I stood in my kitchen drinking water while watching her stumble back and forth between the couch and the chair like a cat, until she found a comfy spot and fell asleep.

The next night we chose to just have a glass of wine each, no bottles, definitely not two bottles, and the pizza was just as amazing as it was the night before. And while the rest of her trip involved no more pole dancing, and no more cab rides, it did involve lots of napping and movie watching, and that was just as fun.