Lost in Conversion

I recently spent a week in Tuscany. It was wonderful, the sights, the weather and damn the food was good. What was difficult was the language barrier. I have been able to get by in Germany and France and at a push I think I could make it through in Spain but Italy was to, paraphrase Ian Rush was like a foreign country to me.

I have never been shouted at, told off or caused so much confusion on any holiday ever. It all started off ok for the first couple of days and then unsuspectingly our hotelier went Basil Fawltey on us for not leaving our key at reception, even though we were never advised to and hadn't for the previous 2 days. So it came at quite a surprise when, in broken English, he started shouting 'This is a hotel not a castle' over and over again. I also got told off for taking photos in a museum, go figure. Buying bus tickets was also quite a quandary as you are supposed to buy them in shops and the bus driver won't check if you have one or sell you one. If the shops are shut, like they where on our last day at 7am you're screwed when you happen to be on the bus with a ticket inspector, as you guessed, we were the other day.

On the last evening we went for dinner and it was a goal of mine to eat steak Florentine. The menu arrived and steak was on the menu. Unfortunately they where selling it by the Kilogram. In fact 36 euros per KG. We couldn't work out how to work out how much steak I needed and after some confusing back and forth with the waitress I decided to order roast beef. She asked me how I would like it and suggested medium rare. About 10 minutes passed and the waitress brought out a raw steak and asked if it was ok for me? At this stage I felt that we had gone to far for me to say no, plus it was the biggest steak I have ever seen. A few minutes later the steak is in front of me and it still is the biggest steak I have ever seen and after a mouthful the best steak I have ever had. Incredibly panicked I start to sweat, literally, over how much this chunk of beef was going to cost me as it was the last night of the holiday money was tight and I had visions of calling my mum and asking her to bail me out...for steak. My rational side that they would never serve anyone more than a kilogram of meat but my irrational side was was thinking this is Italy and this is the biggest steak I have ever seen and could easily be £100. I finished and awaited for the bill to arrive. It takes a life time but eventually landed. I unfolded the paper; adrenaline pumping and sweating profusely (a combination of heat, meat sweats and anticipation of filing for bankruptcy) and after all that the whole bill came to less than 50 euros. That made the dinner taste even better!

So whilst we can't all learn Italian before a holiday we should be able to work out Kilos to oz or at the very least grams to £.