My name is Gina

Thursday night my roommates and I were invited to a dinner party at the apartment of the owner of Eden, one of the more popular bars in Perugia. So like any good mannered connecticut girl would do, I put on my cocktail dress and dropped by Sardi's, a pastry place for some dolci, sweets, to bring as a thank-you-for-having-us-present.
This is where normal ended. Pisco, the owner, who is very eccentric and inappropriate, picked up my friends and I in front of the fountain and city center and we then walked oh, about a mile, to his friend's apartment. He was 30 minutes late AND they haven't even started cooking when we arrived. I might have been expecting a traditional italian sit down dinner with white napkins and such, but what I entered could have been a dorm room at U of R, with lots of posters of sex drugs rock and roll. etc. The owner was a jhorts (jean shorts) wearing boy named Vincenzo, who when we peeked in his bathroom, had no less than 10 tubes of hair gel, all of which were the size of my torso. His head probably sported another tube roughly equal to half my body weight. Shortly there after, Valentino arrived. He has an American mother and worked for two years in at a pizzeria in manhattan, so he has great english. He was to be the chef for the evening. Micael, Amedeo, Antonio, Francesco then arrived. Micael, Pisco and Valentino are the only three who spthe size of my torso of hair geeak english, but the others communicated with lots of cheek pinching, which apparently in a form o affection in italy. Also a lot of head patting, to the point where I actually wondered if in fact they had mistaken me for a dog that liked head patting and ear scratching-yes they did this too. Actually, it was much preferred to the American boy form of affection: groping. I was also renamed Gina, as Carson, even pronounced Car-son, was too much for them. My roomates were renamed Tina, Lina, Mina and Dina too. I called them all Fred in retaliation.
At around 930, we sat down to a dinner of a lotttt of wine, and gnocchi with a sauce of pesto and tomato. I drank the white wine and the red and made sure to eat my gnocchi to soak it up. We all then chatted for about 45 mintues after dinner, aided by the wine. I sat on a chair in my cocktail dress facing the couch that had a lot of the boys on it, and with a italish (italian english hybrid) mix we managed to communicate, plus Valentino and Micael would translate. Apparentely though, when i would turn around to look behind me, my legs would open just a little. Valentino must have noticed, as he asked me "Gina, dearie, would you please cross your legs as I need the blood to return to my brain". Everybody in the room hollered with laughter as I blushed something fierce, and the boys gave me a baseball cap to put on my lap to cover myself, and then pulled me to the couch and consoled my embarrassment by letting me pop all the champagne bottles (after they loosened them, i haven't gained super human strength in italy) as they chanted "Gina, Gina Gina!" It was a little bit surreal. Our second course was pretty much ignored and not eaten as it was....frozen fishsticks? Tres authentic italian food no doubt. We brought out the dessert but it was mostly ignored for the champagne that we would all take turns pouring down each others throat.
After the party wrapped up, we all walked another mile to the bar that Pisco owned, Eden, to enjoy some free drinks and socializing until Domus, the dance club, opened at 2 am. More on that later.