Chocolate Disaster

Last night I had the best pasta I have ever had in my entire life! It was so good!! We had home-made pasta (I don't know how I'm going to go back to eating store-bought noodles) with a creamy asparagus, shrimp, leek sauce. It was incredible! I would never have thought to put shrimp and asparagus together, but it was amazing! I could have eaten it all night long. I probably would have if I didn't have a stomach ache. Our dessert was going to be incredible. Everyone was so excited about it. Luisa kept telling me how delicious it would be. We made a crust that had ginger in it, and then melted chocolate and mixed, among other things, orange zest with it. Then we cooked pears and Luisa arranged them in this beautiful fan pattern on the top. One of the students is here in Italy with his wife to celebrate his birthday. Luisa got so excited because she found a little candle in the dining room and we were going to surprise them and go sing to the guy.

There's a student at the school named Marquious. He's from Brazil and when he speaks it's a big jumble of Portuguese and Italian. When I first got here I thought he was a worker in the kitchen. He seems so familiar with it and with everyone here and he never really mingles with the other students, he often eats with us in the kitchen. I recently found out that he is, in fact, a student. Sometimes he kind of gets in the way because he's been here so much that he just does his own thing and he sometimes causes Luisa grief. He also tends to leave knives in the soapy water. I cut myself on one once. So last night when it was time for dessert Luisa, Marquious, and I went to the dining room to sing to Stephen. Luisa and I went in first and she turned off the lights. Marqiuos was carrying the cake. As he entered the room we were ready to sing, when all of a sudden there was a SPLAT! Somehow the plate slipped right out of his hands! Pear went everywhere and the chocolate masterpiece landed face down on the floor. Everyone was speechless. Marquious looked like a little boy that had done something wrong and was afraid of his mom finding out. Luisa was so sad. Everyone tried to make her and Marqious feel better, but we were all sad we weren't going to get to eat it. It looked SO good. We ran to the kitchen to get paper towels to clean up and when we got back to the dining room Marqious was gone. He had fled the premises. It was so sad and Luisa felt terrible about Marquious running away, she wasn't mad, but had probably given that impression at first. Luckily we had some really good strawberry baverese (a type of cream) in the freezer that was left over last week. Luisa served some of the up with powdered sugar and it was delicious. We actually ended up carving some pieces out of the bottom of the cake that hadn't touched the floor because all of us really wanted to eat some. It was delicious! But poor Marquious. It was actually really funny...to everyone but Marquious and Luisa. I kind of ran into a corner at first so Luisa wouldn't see me laughing. The picture above is Luisa with the remains of our chocolate/pear masterpiece after we'd tried to salvage the part that hadn't touched the floor. Luisa is so funny, she looks kind funny because she was in the middle of saying "Yoo Hoo!" as I was taking the picture.