Udine. Everything's fine.

If you read the title of this blog, and it rhymed... you read it like an American. We were laughed at when we said we were going to ooh-dine. Now we know we are in ooh-din-ay. There you go. Italian lesson complete. :)

To review last night's Big Fat Italian Dinner... including some pics of playing with our Italian cousins. We spoke English, they spoke Italian, and we got along just fine.





This morning we said goodbye to Aunt Dolly and Pierpaolo took us to the train station. First, though, he pulled over and asked if we wanted to go to the bar. Seeing as it was 8:30 in the morning, I wasn't quite convinced... but, no worries, he meant a coffee bar. We were in!

Our hotel, discovered by Elizabeth Allen of Madera, California, was across the street from the train station. The lady inside was very helpful, especially since she spoke English. Just ten minutes from our hotel is the city center... Udine is another walled city, but most of the gate has been demolished. We discovered an AWESOME restaurant just outside of the main square (which, of course, has a hill leading up to castle... which any good city square should). The lady at the hotel gave us the directions but we also should have asked what to order because the menu was not only in Italian, but cursive Italian. It was muy dificil to figure out what we were ordering. I took a chance with what I thought was orzo and ravioli... I got refried beans soup. But no complaints here, it was the best orzo/ravioli/refried beans soup ever. Shandon thought she was safe ordering insalade, but it showed up with some strange sea creature raw on top.

This town completely shuts down for siesta, and we are not talking a ten-minute power siesta. We're talking 4 hours of closed stores and abandoned streets. We are now waiting for siesta to end so we can rejoin society.






Arrivederci.

Italian Mapquest... FAIL.

Up and at it at 5:30 to make the trek of 1.7 miles to the train station to catch an early train. We had our directions in hand, which proved USELESS. We found not one single street listed on the directions. But it was still a day of discoveries. I discovered my friend Shandon has a major talent. Some people can juggle... some can play the trombone... some are ambidextrous... but Shandon's talent is taking a random street and leading the way for an hour and miraculously finding her destination. It was the most amazing thing I've ever witnessed. She'd say, "Let's try this way," and while everything in me was thinking she was wrong... she got us there with thirty minutes to spare.

So anyway, after a short stop in Padova, we made it to Verona. We bought a tourist map for 3 euros and again Navigator Allen took over and we took that city by storm. Definitely in the top 10 coolest cities ever. It still has a lot of its original wall around the city, and we climbed up the castle to get a view of the whole sha-bang. We also found Juliet's balcony... or, should I say "cama de Guillette" or something like that. People put love notes all over the wall under the balcony and use whatever they can find to stick them. There were no Romeos to be seen for us, so our contribution was just a "hello from verona" note.

We had lunch on one of the main drags and coffee at the piazza erbe where we checked off tourist spots on our map but we will have to go back to research what they actually were all about. We didn't have a clue.

Our train back to Oderzo was at 4, and we arrived at 7. Cousin Stefano was there to pick us up, and went to his house for dinner wtih his family. We had a fantastic Italian meal and stuffed ourselves silly.

Good times in Italia!

Ciao! Arrivederci!

"come on, let's go... the double bicycle is here!"

ODERZO!
We are big fans of this city!
We slept in... majorly... I'm not even going to tell you until when because you might judge us for wasting so much time. When we did get going, we had a wonderful time exploring the city of Oderzo. We had lunch in the city centre... saw some tomato plants for Grandpa Sonny... and had our first jumps of the trip!
It was very humid today, but we found a market to buy gigantic waters for tomorrow's day trip into Verona.
The best part of the day was when cousin Stefano brought over the double bike for our usage. It took some getting used to... but we only crashed once!

Up next... Verona.