Back to the Minotaur...

f.  Right...so I seem to have neglected the Minotaur after all this time...hmph.

When I left you, we had just met up with some elderly canadian types who were having a jolly time walkin around in the dark.

So we about-faced again back the way we headed after they told us there was not one but Two trattorias in the vicinity, and they implied that we had given up far too easily.  Needless to say, by the time we got back to our Trattoria, it was still very much closed, and even the Canadians had to agree that the lights up the hill belonged to some pedestrian of sorts.  Not taken off guard by the revelation, the two told us to keep going, so we took five more steps around a bend in the road and lo! another Trattoria shone out in the heavy darkness.

So we wandered our way inside and they went of to one corner and we went straight for the middle, all while a rotund Italian man said something incoherent to us in one of those romantic languages (I think it was Italian).  So we sat down and tried to figure out the menu with an italian dictionary we stole from the Canadians (with their consent) - this approach apparently didn't work to well, since Shannon thought she ordered seafood pasta and ended up getting a bowl of spaghetti noodles floatin in some broth with a few tablespoons of fish-food dumped on top.  She decided the guy must have gone to a pet store and thought the picture of a fish on a can meant fish seasoning.  Anyways, halfway through the meal, one of the ladies walked over to our table and said: "Excuse me [in a voice much louder than necessary], what is the creature called that is half man and half horse?"

Trying to recover from the initial shock of the question, I mumbled something about a centaur, at which point the lady at the other side of the room yelled, "Ask them what a Minotaur is!"  

"No, it's not a minotaur, it's a centaur," we tried to reason.

"No, it show up in Harry Potter all the time."  I cringed at the mention of the name.  For crying out loud, I can't even go to Italy without hearin about that harry loon.

"It's a centaur."

She turned around.  And then back again - "What's a minotaur?"  

After we convinced her that it was, in fact, a centaur, she walked back to the other table and said, quite audibly, "It's called a cinotaur."  

She did point out at some point in the conversation that a picture of the backside of the horse/man creature was on the wall, which served as the instigator of such strange conversation.  That made me feel a little better about the situation, but I still don't think I will ever properly recover.