Birthday, Verona, Garden, etc.

Ciao all!
We are still doing very well and have had lots of fun since our last blog. Heli proceeded to get a second birthday cake, we visited Verona(and our friend Deedee Narducci) and have worked hard to finish planting our fall garden!

For Heli’s birthday we made her a pear and chocolate cake, and decorated her place at the table for when she woke up. In the night we went to Daniele’s neighborhood sagra (Festival for the patron saint.) and got to meet his family and friends! He also surprised Heli with a beautiful cake topped with all beautiful fruits! Currents, strawberries, grapes, peaches, we will have to post a picture of it. After the sagra we went to the street (Via Galucci) where everyone goes out on Friday and Wednesday nights. The street gets FULL of people and it is a task to get from one end to the other. It was fun and we met some of Erika’s friends (including Fabio and Fabio). Miles also called to wish Heli a happy birthday which was a treat! After this we went to bed and spent Saturday resting and working on grammer etc…

Sunday we went to Verona and had a lovely tour by Deedee, who is studying Italian at a language school there. (Wherever you go there is always someone from Farifield.) We saw all the sights of Verona including la casa di Giuliette (Juliete’s House from Romeo and Juliet) and the beautiful Arena-an outdoor Roman amphitheater. It is currently the opera house of Verona and can seat 20.000 people. We have missed the opera season sadly but we did get to watch a pop concert being filmed for TV while we were there… Kind of odd to go and see such an old structure and then have hip hop being preformed inside. But it was definitely entertaining. We also did pose with a Roman soldier outside the Arena. Hopefully we can find a picture of this for the blog.

At the Acetaia we have been working on weeding and organizing the garden. Today we finished with planting a winter crop of beets, chard, spinach, arugula, parsley, onions, and salad greens. The temperature does not get as cold so we have a longer growing season. The soil is very hard here (not quite as easy to work with as in Iowa) and it was a bit of a battle to get the beds into order. But we are very happy with our work now that it is done.

This afternoon Erika gave us a grammer lesson-mostly on verbs. They are very tricky to get used to as there are many more conjugations to deal with. We are still struggling to communicate and often are too shy to say much in Italian. With Daniele, if something is too difficult to translate, we just start humming the mission impossible soundtrack and start laughing. But I think that we are getting a bit better. Tomorrow we are making pizza for our neighbor and his friends and we will be forced to speak mostly Italian which is good. We will see how much we are able to communicate.

That’s about all that we are up to. We will write more as things come up.
Hope everyone is doing well.