Asiago

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So this entry will be on my time in Asiago. It should be pretty short since it was a pretty relaxing weekend and we spent a lot of time just lounging around at the hotel.
So Asiago started on a Friday afternoon when Claudio showed up in a bus to take us to Asiago. We had to climb an entire cliff face to get there. Asiago looked more like Austria, something out of “The Sound Of Music”, because all there were were mountains and rolling green hills with cows on them. We arrived pretty late in the evening, but there was still enough time for me to get on my hiking boots and make it half-way up the mountain before I had to turn back. We had, as is the case normally with Claudio, an enormous dinner, free of charge. Every meal for the next two days was exactly the same way. For the first time I got to try fried cheese, in Asiago, which is one of the cheese capitals of Italy. It was absolutely awesome.
That night we went to a bar called “Casa Rossa”, where they had an “All You Can Eat” pizza deal. It was 10 euro, plus you got a free small beer. Anyways, as even though we had already eaten dinner, I started eating the pizza, but then the girls ended up wanting some as well. It started to get silly, but by the end of the night, I had “eaten” 3 full pizzas. The waitress we had was incredible too. I kept on telling Claudio’s wife, Rita, who only speaks Italian and Spanish, “Il mio cuore e’ sul pavimento ogni volta lei vedo”, meaning, every time I see her (the waitress), my heart is on the floor. She was working though, so I didn’t wanna bother her, but Rita told me that I should go after her because you never know what could be true love…unfortunately, things didn’t work out.
The next morning I got up a little early on my own and made my way all the way to the top of the mountain. It was pretty beautiful, not surprisingly, so I took a whole bunch of pictures. I actually had to crawl underneath a couple of barbed wire fences. I also realized that there aren’t many people in my pics, so I took one of myself.
So that day, we did the usual shopping. All I bought was booze because that seems to be the only thing that is mildly affordable in Italy. After that we got to go to a cheese factory and see and taste all of the cheeses they make there. The series of pictures that I have shows how they poured out the cheese into a big vat, then drained the excess water out . It didn’t have much flavor at that point, but it hadn’t been aged much either. After this we got to try the cheese which was great. That concluded the day and we went back to the hotel to have another dinner.
The next morning we rode some horses, which was confusing at first because I’m used to the western style of riding where we can ride with one hand. My horse wouldn’t turn for a while , and I guess the guy expected us to know how to guide the horses because we had about 3 minutes of instruction when we went out and we actually got a chance to gallop; which in retrospect was fun, but at the time I had wished that I wore a more supportive pair of undies, because its kinda a rough ride. The horses had to walk downhill on flat rock at one point, which was scary because they were slipping a lot. One of the girls had never ridden before and her horse started to take off because it was scared of a curious cow that we saw. She didn’t really know how to stop the horse either, so it just kinda took off, scaring the rest of the horses. It ultimately resulted in some tears being shed, and the instructor yelling a bit. Thankfully, nobody got hurt. The day was pretty calm after that as we were headed home at 2, but I didn’t leave before buying about 40 euro worth of cheese and honey.

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