The Expedit project
The gastronomic "expeditition"
IT ALL STARTED WITH ONE BOTTLE.
When I arrived in Parma, neither knowing what my new home for the next year would look like, nor who my new two flat mates would be, I was excited just like before a first date. I knew their names and where they were from. Curious as I was, I tried to figure out what they looked like by going on Facebook, but still, the first meeting was something special. At around 8:00 pm the last of us three, Nanae, coming from faraway Mexico, arrived and we immediately agreed that we should inaugurate our apartment and get to know each other better.
There we sat in our empty white kitchen, without any food or drinks. The shops had already closed and all we could do was look through the cupboards, hunting for something drinkable. Success. We found a nice warm bottle of Prosecco in our not-working fridge. Ottimo! Maybe it is an Italian tradition to leave a bottle for the next tenant, or maybe just a nice landlord – we still don’t know, but we thank the kind person anyway. The Prosecco was delicious.
A few days later we still had this empty Prosecco bottle in our kitchen and we still did not know where to put it. Do Italians separate litter? It turns out they do, but it took us some time to find the yellow rubbish bin on our street. However, after some time we finally found the right place for the bottle. After taking the bottle back and forth from the kitchen to the living room, I noticed that our empty Expedit (a bookcase from Ikea, but less famous than Billy) looked so sad, standing alone in our living room. That was the moment when the Expedit Project started, with our first bottle of Prosecco, which I placed right in the middle of the bookcase. If you look at our pretty Expedit now, it might look like we three are alcoholics, but NO we are not, and NO, we are not too lazy to bring the bottles downstairs to the yellow bin. This shelf just reflects the wonderful moments we share in our apartment. There are always friends coming over, bringing nice wine/beer/grappa to celebrate the great time we have here in Parma.
By the way, on Friday we are having aperitivo in our apartment. You want to come and join us on our gastronomic “expeditition?”