Little Italy.

This month is flying by! I can't even believe it's already the 5th of December! And we go home in TWO WEEKS. What!?

For some reason, no matter how much I deck out the house in red, gold, and glitter, it doesn't feel much like Christmas here, even less than it did in Hawaii somehow. I don't think I could ever get used to the Christmas in warm weather and I legitimately wish all people from warmer climates got to experience Christmas in a real winter setting. It's magical.

But we partook in many Christmas activities this weekend. Saturday we did the majority of our Christmas shopping and we watched The Santa Clause. Love Tim Allen. Mostly because I associate him with JTT. Hello 2nd grade crush. And today, we went to Little Italy downtown because I just really love my heritage. No actually, I just really wanted a limonata. If you don't know what a limonata is you're totally missing out. It's like a sparkling lemonade.

And limonatas are usually sold at Italian delis. And Italian delis are the best thing in the world. So I Yelp'd a good deli and read amazing things about Mona Lisa. And it TOTALLY exceeded my expectations. I didn't expect anything we ate in Little Italy to live up to what I've grown up eating or what I've eaten in the North End of Boston or even what we had in San Francisco. But Mona Lisa is really freaking good.

I had a Caprese sandwich and my limonata:

And Matt had a capicola, mortadella, salami, and provolone sandwich. Which is a REAL Italian sub. Not salami and ham. Or salami and pepperoni. He ate the first half during the two seconds I was taking pictures of my sandwich.

Super thinly shredded lettuce is always a good sign.

Then we got Gelato here:


Which was really good. And walked around Little Italy.


There are a ton of really cute, bright colored cottages that the Italian fishermen used to live in back in the day. The owners of this house obviously LOVE their heritage:


Look who we stumbled upon!


That's John Basilone, Matt's idol.

The thing I liked most about it though is there seems to be a sense of community. People were out and about and there were tons of people speaking Italian. That just makes my heart sing.

Also these are made in Little Italy:


That makes it a pretty amazing place, right?