Beautiful Ice-Cream – Ugly Baby Jesus – Unwell E@L

In the town of San Gimignano there are a lot of towers. It’s famous for its towers. There are a few museums (like the Torture Museum, that I missed) and there are the some bloody good ice-cream shops.

This one sells the World Champion Gelato.

And just a few metres away, this one sells The Best Ice-cream in the World. Spoiled for choice.

The pistachio ice-cream here in the second place was truly beautiful and a joy to the palate. Miraculous.

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In the next square is the Museo Civico in which there is quite a collection of frescoes of the Madonna with particularly unattractive baby Jesus’s*, so E@L wandered around snapping pic after pic…

And E@L’s personal favorite (this one is from the Duomo in Siena…)

When he left the museum – the three story part in the middle here, with the crenelated rooftop – he decided, after all those earlier misgivings and the others refusing to climb it, that it would not much of a problem after all for him to climb the Torre Grossa, (as seen in Assassin’s Creed II apparently) on the right, and go way up there, 57m (177ft)… No problem…

Smart?

No.

Problem. So here’s E@L on the top of the tower having some pretty fucking severe angina.

Famous last words? “Great view from up here!”

Cue: Ambulance to Siena, angiogram, stents, hospital for a week… And associated drama of logistics, etc… for Izzy and Danijel and Vicky… and then for myself to get home as I was not supposed to fly for a week after discharge.

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Sigh. Why did E@L climb that fucking tower? What was he thinking? Maybe he was thinking that the PET stress test he’d had done two weeks earlier showed normal cardiac perfusion is maybe what he was thinking.

Cardiologist in Singapore yesterday says, “Mmm, that normal test, very high predictive value, this shouldn’t have happened.”

E@L says, “No it shouldn’t have.”

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Expect E@L to be going on about this incident a lot in the near future…

* Not to be confused with uglyrenaissancebabies.

I Scream, You Scream, We All Scream

I was in this ostentatiously unpretentious Osteria in Sienna tonight, Bongo Della Fuckit, got the sense of it being somewhat hipsterish, but then everything Italian looks hipsterish to me. I was going vegetarian tonight as approved by my cardiologist* – not sure if the almond bisuits dipped into a glass of vin santo (sticky wihte) is vegetarian or not – when there was some slight commotion on the table behind. It seems there was nothing “kid friendly” on the dessert menu for their young son – maybe 5 or 6 years old.

The waiter had to sort this out! So he went to the front door, called the kid over, took his hand and led him outside. A few minutes later the kid almost ran inside again, smiling right from tragus to tragus, bearing in front of him a large cup of multiple flavours of gelatti, wafer triangle poking out the top, from the gelatteria across the small lane.

The waiter had paid for it. All part of the hipster service – they were being nice way before it was cool to be nice.

E@L

* Not only did none of the Doctors give me any rehab exercise suggestions or any diet suggestions on my checkout, not one of the staff introduced themselves before they stabbed me or stripped me naked in front of the open doors to the busy corridor, bathed my balls or wiped the shit from my arse (when I could get them to.)