italy, ti amo!

Where to start? Italy is amazing. And this Italy – the North – is so so different than the Italy we experienced in Calabria (to state the obvious). It wasn’t as brutto (bad) there as some people say it is, but that’s probably because of the cheap food, great friends and mild weather. Here, the people are friendly too – we live right next to a couple that’s already invited us in for drinks and shared home-made, soaked in grappa cherries (strrrrong), home-made limoncello, wine (also home-made), grapes (from the garden) and more – Luciano even showed us his for-Christmas rum and fruit concoction, in the works since May, with everything coming from their very own garden. Ouuuuf… amazing, right? A man down the street gave me three heads of lettuce from his overflowing garden, and there are so many tomatoes on the vines in the neighborhood that the tomats are going bad – which makes me wonder if it would be grossly inappropriate if I helped myself. (Would it be? Being new to the area, probably yes.)

Let’s see, what else. We live in a two story house (a house!) with four bedrooms and two baths, and… a garage! With tools! We may never leave this place. The views are amazing, and the town seems great too. We went on an afternoon stroll in Trento and snapped some pics (house pics and more coming after we finish unpacking):

the view from our balcony... with an amazing look into one of two gardens loaded with fruit and veggies - !!

in a park downtown - beautiful!

compost bins on a clean street... love it!

yup, we've already hit the gelato... how do they make it so good?

in one of the main piazzas in Trento

mmmmmm, good cafe!

our happy guy :)

Our Italian is slowly coming back. It’s a bit rusty, but I’m sort of surprised at how easily it’s resurfaced. Sure, French and Spanish has snuck in here and there (like yesterday, when I slipped up and said melanzana instead of mele when referring to the overloaded apple tree in the back corner of the garden, and Antonella corrected me and said that there were apples in the back and yes, we have eggplants too, but they’re around the corner - !!), but it’s been better for both of us than we’d thought. People are asking already if we’re going to speak Italian to Hendrik, and I think it’s inevitable, because when we’re out and about we’ll be speaking Italiano, not necessarily English.

And Hendrik! He was sooo awesome on the plane – nothing like the girl sitting next to us (horrrrrible horrible horrible), and we all lucked out with bulkhead seats and a little bassinet for Hendrik, which he LOVED. When he started getting tired (a few hours into the flight), we put him in there and his eyes lit up like he was experiencing the most fabulous thing in the universe, and he went from drowsy babe to the opposite end of the sleep spectrum: hyper-hyper happy happy. Anyways, he settled down after a while and got three hours of sleep on the plane (neither of us got much shut-eye) and then in Frankfurt the whole family passed out in a quiet corner. When we arrived in Verona around 2:00 the next day, Ricardo was there to pick us up and we scooted up to Trento in just over an hour with all of our stuff rammed into the minivan… yay. And even though there are some overtired crazies going around (videos coming), we’re still beating the jet lag… fingers crossed that we keep winning.

in the bassinet on the plane - he loooooved it!

And the volleyball? That’s why we’re here, yup. Steve had training on Saturday morning, and not again until Tuesday; several players are just returning from European Championships, so the group was given a few extra days off. Anyways, I’m starting to ramble, so I think it’s time for me to get to bed. More pics coming soon!