The papa has a papá

Let's see what we've been up to this week...

Italian language classes

Tyson and I started taking free language classes at night. The classes are taught immersion-style, which means they use only Italian when teaching, with a few exceptions. We've attended 3 classes so far and they've been very helpful.

Things I've learned so far:
Basic introduction sentences like "My name is" and "I'm from America."
Basic vocabulary like grandma/grandpa, etc.
Basic verbs and their conjugation-to be/to eat/to go/to understand
Adjectives-young/old/fat/skinny
I know colors and numbers now.
But that's just a basic list, they are teaching us so much every class.

Important word to know in Italy: "allora", which means "so" or "then". They use it all the time here.

I had a funny moment in class where I was asked to read a sentence in Italian aloud. The sentence was talking about how Francesca lived with her papá. Apparently where you place the accent on this word matters. Place it at the end and it's her father, place it at the beginning and it's the pope! So I definitely said she lives with the pope.

I've noticed I'm starting to understand what people are saying and I'm getting pretty good at reading, but speaking in Italian is harder. I think that's pretty normal, but it's annoying not being able to respond to things. I'm sure this will improve with practice.

Our classroom is quite diverse. We have people from all over the world: Ethiopia, Pakistan, Bulgaria, Bangladesh, Senegal, Romania, Ukraine, and Canada. We are the only Americans in the class.

The teachers are wonderful and friendly. We ran into one of our teachers the other day and she wants to get together with us sometime to practice her English, which is already very good. I'm all for it because she said she could help us practice our Italian too!

Food

Here are some pictures and descriptions of restaurants we've been to in Trento.

Restaurant: Birreria Pedavena (German beer hall)
Type of food: German and Italian
The atmosphere of this place is amazing; there are strings of lights everywhere and it has big, ambient rooms. You can also see where they brew their beer on the premises.


I had the Wurstl, seen below. It was okay, but not great. The roasted potatoes, on the other hand were crispy and delicious.


Tyson had the wiener schnitzel and he liked it a lot. I tried a bite and I thought it tasted exactly like a chicken mcnugget from McDonald's. I wasn't a fan, but it wasn't bad either.


Here's a pic of the bread they give you; it was fluffy and tasted like rye.


Here's the beer! They give you a generous amount and it tastes great.



Restaurant: Sushi Zen
Type of food: Japanese
We discovered this restaurant the day we moved into our temporary apartment, since it's right across the street. The inside of the facility is beautiful. It has low lighting with sparkly lamps. It also has some seating where you sit low to the ground and you place your feet in a recessed area. The food here is absolutely amazing. I wish we could eat here every day.

Here's the restaurant


I had the California rolls, or as they call them here " California Speciale". These are inside out rolls with rice, avocado, crab, cucumbers and sesame seeds sprinkled on the outside. So delicious and fresh, especially with wasabi. I got this dish because I'm new to eating sushi.


Tyson accidentally ordered the wrong sushi and didn't like it much. It was an adventurous spicy tuna roll and had green roe (fish eggs) on top.


He also ordered some tonno (tuna) tekka maki that he enjoyed, but we forgot to take a picture of it.

We also had tori yaki meshi, which is fried rice with chicken and teriyaki sauce. Super yummy. It was hard to eat this with chopsticks, but by the end of the meal I was a lot better at it.



Restaurant: The Green Tower or Terra Verde
Type of food: Italian
This is a great restaurant to visit if you want some authentic Trentino-style cuisine. They also have employees that speak English, but we always use Italian so we can learn.

Below is what I ordered at Torre Verde: strangolapreti "strangled priests" which are gnocchi made with spinach, sage, and butter. One of the explanations for the name is that priests enjoyed the dish so much that they ate it until they choked! I followed it up with some excellent espresso.


Tyson gets the pepperoni pizza here, which is some of the best pizza in town. I'll take a picture of it next time we're there.

Trento at Christmas

Trento puts you in the Christmas spirit by decorating trees and stringing up lights everywhere.









They also have street vendors who sell vin brûlée (mulled wine), bombardini (alcoholic egg nog), and caldarroste (roasted chestnuts). We had steaming cups of mulled wine yesterday and they helped warm us up and get us excited for the holidays!

fino alla prossima volta,
Susie

Plane, Plane, Taxi, Train

Hey folks,
Sorry it's taken so long for me to update! We've been busy getting accustomed to our new city and trying to find consistent free wi-fi. I finally decided to painstakingly update the blog with my phone. So here we go...

Travel
Traveling to Italy was absolutely exhausting. We hopped a plane from Houston to Paris--9 hours of flight time. This leg of our journey was wonderful with plenty of room, lots of food/wine, and movies. Tyson even ran into a friend from high school and spent some time catching up with him.

Our in-flight menu on Air France:


After the first leg, we had a 7 hour layover in Paris. This sounds like it would be enough time to leave and explore but it really wasn't. At this point we were extremely tired, so we took shifts napping. I also got to try some espresso from Illy, which is an Italian favorite and it was quite good. Finally, we boarded a one and a half hour flight to Verona and slept the whole way. Once in Verona, we went through customs. Here's how the exchange went: "Do you have anything to declare?" "No." Then we walked out. Simple.

Next, we took a taxi from Verona to the train station. The taxi ride was pleasant, with Tyson attempting to make small talk with our Italian speaking driver. Ty's comprehension is great, but he didn't have a lot to respond with! Haha.

After the taxi ride, we had to figure out where to catch our train to Trento. It was confusing because everything was in a foreign language and we didn't know the norms, but Tyson figured it out for us. The train station was the most stressful part of the travel because we were freezing, exhausted, and carrying way too much luggage. In our defense, we brought a small amount for living here for 3 years. At one point, we almost missed the train because they changed where it was coming in at the last minute; amazingly, Tyson somehow figured this out from the overhead announcements which were in Italian. I was too frazzled to pay attetion, so he was a lifesaver. Anyway, I was freaking out a bit on the train because we had so much luggage and limited time to find somewhere to put it all on the train. Some cute old Italian men and women thought I looked worried because I couldn't find my seat, so they were speaking Italian to help me find it. I thought that was sweet, even though I was looking for luggage space. After about an hour on the train, we had arrived in Trento! We wearily walked our bags to Hotel Buonconsiglio, where we gratefully went to sleep.

Moral of the story: traveling so far is tiring--get plenty of sleep and pack lightly if possible.

Our Temporary Apartment
FBK kindly arranged for a temporary apartment while we look around for a place to live. My favorite part about the apartment is this lamp:



It's a lamp made out of a Trento champagne bottle! Other than that, the apartment has everything we need since it's furnished. The apartment is where we experienced some culture shock. Where everything is bigger in Texas, everything is smaller in Italy! The apartment itself is a decent size but the cups, wine glasses, plates, washing machine, and even the towels are much smaller. I had to laugh when I was drinking red wine from a glass that looked like it was made for port. I'm guessing one of the reasons Europeans are thin is because of these small plates. Though I have to say, in restaurants everything is "normally" sized.

Other differences-they don't tend to have clothes dryers here. We just hang stuff up to dry and it hasn't been hard to adjust. They also rarely have bath tubs, which is harder because I like baths! We are currently looking for a permanent apartment, so maybe we'll get lucky and find one that has a tub.

Public Transportation
Public transportation is great in Trento, as one would imagine. You can easily hop a local bus to anywhere in the city for about a buck. They also have fast and fairly cheap trains to get to other cities. Airfare is also reasonable. We plan on doing a lot of traveling while we're here and can take advantage of cheap rates. I'd love to go to Vienna, Rome, Florence, Venice, Bologna, Bolzano, Paris, Alsace and anywhere else I can. So excited to see where we go!

We got off on the wrong bus stop last week and found this view:




The City
Trento is so beautiful. Cobblestone streets everywhere and a lovely view of the Alps/Dolomites! The people here are very friendly, so it makes sense that it's known as "The smiling city." Compared to the U.S., it's not that smiley, but I think they're smiley for Europeans.

The people here don't usually speak fluent English, but they know enough that we can communicate between their small knowledge of English and our small knowledge of Italian. Hand gestures help. I've already learned several words and phrases, mostly related to eating at restaurants or buying things. Immersion is such a great way of learning.

Pics of Trento
This is the Piazza Duomo, which has a cool statue of Neptune.


We had beer and wine at this cafe in Piazza Duomo, it's called Caffe Portici.





The cafe gives you free chips and peanuts when you order alcohol. Trento has a lot of German/Austrian influences, which is why there's a good selection of beer, apple strudel, and schnitzel. Next time we go to this cafe, I'm going to order their signature drink "uno spritz", which is a mix of prosecco and Aperol--yum! It's basically sparkling white wine mixed with an Italian aperitif, similar to Campari.

Food
Of course I'm loving the food, since Italian is my favorite cuisine. I had heard from many Americans that the pizza was not good, but I personally love the pizza here. We have already had pizza 3 times while here and every time the pizza was excellent. I'd say the pizza is thinner than American pizza in general, which is why I like it. We had pepperoni pizza at a place called the Green Tower and Tyson loved it. So we may bring family there when they visit.

Here's a cool product I found at the grocery store called Pocket Coffee. It has liquid espresso inside of a chocolate. It's tasty.



I also tried nutella for the first time and really enjoyed that. I never knew that it was created in Italy.


In Conclusion
We wanted to get more pictures of the town, but the weather has been unusually (so I'm told) rainy. Hopefully the weather will clear up and we can get some good pictures for the blog.

Starting on Saturday, we are going to attend (free!) Italian language lessons, so hopefully we will start understanding our surroundings more.

Ciao bambino!

Location:Trento, Italy