Living a Dream

Jenna had the idea that we should go to Verona for Valentine's day of our year abroad. Thanks to Romeo & Juliet, Verona claims to be the city of love and pulls out all the stops to make Valentine's day extra special despite the fact that Shakespeare had never been there and Juliet's balcony is a sham. In any case, this was our third stop in Verona but this one was on a mission. The city hosts something called "Verona in Love." They basically set up chocolate stands everywhere and put hearts on almost anything in the city that draws people. This is great if you like chocolate and even better if you know, unequivocally, that chocolate is the best thing in the world. We fall into the 2nd category. There's more than just chocolate though: They have photo-ops, rose gardens, markets, entertainers, and much more. A walk through the city is somehow even more alive on Valentine's day than it is on any other day, which is an accomplishment. There's ...

Italy is a pretty cool place, as you might've noticed from all the photos I've been posting and blog entries I've made. With that in mind, we decided to try a road-trip weekend. The plan was to pick out some notable hill-towns in/around Tuscany and just drive. We'd also booked an Agriturismo for two nights because that's something we'd heard about doing. An Agriturismo is essentially a farm-house that rents out rooms. Some are more luxurious than others, including pools, hot-tubs, and more. Others focus on the agriculture aspect and are working farms where wine, jams, meat, fruit, and much more are produced. We opted for a small place outside of Florence because it featured an onsite dinner. We'd heard that the best part about Agriturismos were that they serve seemingly endless dinners for a flat-rate that gets added to the price of your room. We wanted that. The dinner did not disappoint, but that's going to show up in photos in a subsequent post. ...

On an unseasonably warm weekend in late January, Jenna and I ventured off to Torino, Italy. It might sound familiar as the host city of the 2006 olympics, although you would've heard of it as Turin because we're Americans and we don't pronounce things the way they're supposed to be pronounced. For some details on the trip and the impressions of Torino, I'll direct you here . It's a 7-things-you-should-know article I wrote over on Robot Butt, which is also a ridiculous site you should check out. So here I'll put a few things and a few photos. Torino has a few big attractions, including a museum of cinema, an Egyptian museum, and a mind-blowing landscape, but they have a ton of smaller attractions too. The Egyptian museum, from our experience, was a complete dud. Most of it was under construction and the stuff that was available was nothing to write home about. Apparently we're in the minority in that opinion because it's wildly popular on sites ...

Ever heard of Lecco? No, you haven't. We only heard of it because it was the destination of a regional train in Milan. We secondarily heard of it because it's the 2nd biggest town on Lake Como, where we'd been a couple weeks earlier. But this was January, and the same reasoning held up as when we went to Como; if it's January and it's warm enough to get by in a long-sleeve tee, you'd best get outside and enjoy it. So we booked a train to Lecco for the day and decided to do some hiking. It was wonderful. First view of Lecco The town itself was very similar to other towns we'd been to. It had a main walking street with loads of shops, butchers, cheeseries, and high-end clothing retailers. It had a waterfront park area where folks would stroll for what seemed like hours on end. It had all you might want, and then it also had a weirdly large number of teens, but we'll get back to that. We started toward the nearest mountain, knowing that there...