Pop quiz: You've just returned from San Diego. You have a ton of laundry and packing to do before going to Connecticut tomorrow. Your landlord and his wife stop by from upstairs to give you your Christmas present, which happens to be a bottle of limoncello (lemon-based liquor; for those of you living in CT, you'll find out about it soon enough). You then give them their presents from you, which consist mainly of a bottle of good scotch whiskey, a Hickory Farms gift pack (hey, I wanted to get them something American), and all the Hershey's bars and Tootsie Rolls you could fit into your shopping basket (all very nicely wrapped in Christmas wrapping paper). In their gratitude, they invite you up to have pizza with them. However, as previously mentioned, you haven't packed a damn thing to go back to the States yet. Also, you have a Cornish game hen in the oven, within 30 minutes of being done. What do you do?

Answer: Of course you go have the damn pizza. You can cook a chicken anytime. One of the pizzas had french fries on it; I thought that was kind of wierd. But it actually tasted pretty damn good, so I guess they're onto something. Their two daughters sat there giggling and behaving like little girls the whole time, and even though I only understood about a quarter of what they were saying, I still sort of followed along. Sort of like having my own little Italian family. I think my landlord was actually kind of happy to have another guy up for dinner, since he's normally the only one. For the record, I've been told to, a) say hi and Merry Christmas to my family, b) come back with a picture of my family, and c) drag my family's collective ass out here to visit sometime this year.