Feast of the Assumption
I had a great weekend. Note only did I take a surprise trip to Cleveland to visit my girlfriend, but I was also able to take my yearly journey to the Feast of the Assumption in Little Italy.
The Feast is a Roman Catholic celebration of the Virgin Mary’s ascent into Heaven (Wikipedia page here), but really, it’s just an excuse to have a four-day-long street fair. All the stores and restaurants in Little Italy set up booths on the street and sell cheap Italian food to the passers-by: think of a county fair, but instead of hot dogs, you have Italian sausage and bowls of pasta; instead of ice cream, you have Italian ices and gelato; instead of cotton candy there is tiramisu. You can also get a few of the usual suspects: shaken lemonades, elephant ears, and funnel cakes. So it’s like a fair, but with the best fair food you’ve ever had. Little Italy is within walking distance of my undergraduate school, and the Feast was the standard destination after a long day spent moving in to your new apartment or dorm room. It has become a yearly tradition, so I was glad I had the opportunity to go last weekend.
This year, I started off with a lemonade and a bowl of gnocchi, which are basically small potato dumplings in a tomato sauce. They’re also basically the greatest thing ever. I then ate a piece of a companion’s fried dough, bought a lemon ice, and promptly gave it to my girlfriend when I saw the sign for chocolate-orange gelato. Gelato is like ice cream but denser, because air isn’t whipped into it. It’s tasty.
So yeah, good weekend. My stomach is still thanking me. Mmmm, gelato.