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