The Dalmatian ham with Pag (a salty sheep cheese) that my parents and I ordered recently on the Croatian island of Mljet came with loads of olives. Fourteen, by my count. My mother, who likes olives, took four. My father, whose hatred of olives I’ve inherited, took none. Since I had challenged myself to eat every olive I could this summer in an effort to appreciate what so many of my friends love in them, that left me with 10.
I was cautiously optimistic. In Naples, I had returned to my new favorite pizzeria, Starita, on my last day in town to see if I could tolerate an olive pizza. I couldn’t, and ended up plucking the olives off, downing them rapidly, then enjoying the rest of the pie. But several times last week in Apulia, Italy, I was given tiny green olives as a starter. And for the first time, there in the Trattoria da Donato in Coreggia, I found myself actually tolerating them, to the point that I unconsciously reached for another after declaring that I’d had enough. I attributed this to post-bike-ride starvation, or a silent détente between me and the thousands of olive trees I had cycled past that week. But at least it was progress.
So when I found the greenish-black olives in Mljet to be utterly disgusting — horribly salty and with that same dastardly olive flavor that pops out even as a minor ingredient in a dip — I was disappointed. Yet this was actually a step forward. For the first time I was able to distinguish between olives, whereas before they all just tasted like over-salted ellipsoids forged in the furnaces of culinary hell.
My progress on exercising-while-traveling also gets a mixed report. I’ve gone running exactly once a week, fewer times than I’ve eaten olives. That’s the bad news. The good news is I have been plenty active. Hiking, swimming and, last week in Apulia, four days of hours-long bike rides over hilly terrain, which easily beat a 30-minute run. I haven’t given up on the running, but I’m reaching the conclusion that if you want to exercise on vacation, you have to camouflage the workouts as part of the trip, much as you would hide a dog’s pill inside a gob of peanut butter.
If only hiding olives inside peanut butter worked so well.