A tale of a girl and her catfish.

So, I embarked on an exciting and awesome adventure. I went fishing. Adventure? You may question my description...exciting...awesome... Rachel and fish? Two things that have not mixed so well in the past. Yet, I repeat, I went fishing. You see, here in Italy fishing is entirely different. Such changes as; carp--Italians eat these foul creatures for some reason (although the carp here don't resemble the mutant fish you see floating in Lake Powell), also the fish here have acquired a completely different taste, a more refined taste. Instead of yucky, slimy worms or that sick power-paste crap we used back at home to bait fish into biting a shiny, sharp metal thing called a hook, they use garbanzo beans. And it works. I caught a fish. A catfish...with a garbanzo bean.

This is proof that I actually caught a fish...they made me hold it while

they took a picture. rude.

I even caught this unsightly, smelly creature with a teeny tiny pole (The fishing guy gave me this abnormally small pole, I think, because he was making fun of me and my awesome fishing skills, but I caught a fish, so there). Everyone sitting around me caught ,like, five fish each, but I was happy with my one. And don't worry I didn't keep it, that is cruel! I dumped it back into the wild of the stocked fishing pond.

I worked hard to catch this fish. I labored hard to put a garbanzo bean on the hook, and worked even harder to cast my line out in the water (opposed to the grass twenty feet to my right) and still worked even harder to wait and wait and wait. But no fish could best me! The little catfish didn't even know I was coming! After working up a sweat reeling the poor bugger in, I let someone else catch him with a net and take the hook out. Not going to work that hard, AND that's gross. But they made me touch the fish anyway to take the picture. And it was gross.

Overall, the moral of the story remains: fishing is an extreme sport over here in Italy. Nothing like the boring, monotonous fishing back in the States. And I actually enjoyed myself while doing it. ha! I had to come all the way to Italy to realize fishing isn't that bad! Eating it on the other hand... never gonna happen, i don't care how "good" it tastes.