Hotel Parma & Congressi

... Food, and Sleep. I meet a whole congregation of Gregs friends, all of whom had just as much English as I have Italian. We got by the formalities but just barely. <br>Friday night consisted of everyone going to a resturaunt and ordering whole pizzas to themselves. People here eat their pizza with a knife and fork! There is no such thing as a slice and sharing a pizza among friends. To each their own, and they devour it like a gourmet meal . And ...

Saturday: We were going to go chestnut hunting! But first, we had lunch at Nonna's (gramma) and it felt very Thanksgiving-y. We sat at the fancy table, and there were 9 of us. The food was delicious, I had wine and champagne, and although the meal started with my usual sadness and feelings of "I wish I was with my family instead", by the end it was pretty fun. Then we went back home, grabbed a bunch of warm clothes and chestnut hunting gloves, and ...

So we decided to wing it today and just got on the train for a day trip to Parma. This was one of the places that was on my must do list. We tried to find the tourist office but it was closing in 10 minutes and we (as usual) didnt know where we were going. Almost everything shuts down in the afternoons over here and i guess the tourism office was no different. We had some time to kill so we got a bit of ...

... and did a little shopping. On our way out of Parma we stopped at an Ikea yippee! (Where I accidentally set off an alarm by going out of the wrong door). We spent the evening at the apartment and said goodbye to Lorelei and Arthur. As a side note not sure if I mentioned this earlier you might want to ask David how the womens restrooms are in Verona and Parma haha

... boarded the plane and removed the sick passenger. We then refueled and were able to leave Detroit about an hour behind schedule. David and I watched &#8220;The Hangover&#8221; (again) and basically had a good flight. We landed in Amsterdam and boarded our flight to Venice with no other problems. We drove from Venice to Reggiolo through some ...

For a nice little day trip, Zoe and I decided to go to one of the main cities in Emilia-Romagna (the province where our father hails from): Parma.<br><br>The city is reknowned for parmesan cheese and Parma ham, or as we call it, prosciutto.<br><br>If you like quaint churches and little shops, this place is great to visit!<br>

... be no main course as the risotto was so rich and decadent that none of us could handle another dish. (Photos of cheese were found on the internet, I didn't have my camera with me.) This weekend turned out to be more than our annual foodfest in Italy. On Sunday evening we received a call from Seth and Rachel announcing their engagement. Seth, who had been planning the moment for months, asked her in the courtyard of the Louvre, and filmed the moment to ...

... but I did not love their wines - oh well, plenty more to come. That evening we went to an award winning restaurant and had about 6 courses of various fish dishes. Quite interesting, a modern style restaurant. Yesterday we went to see the Parmigiana Reggiana being made. A real highlight for me. Besides seeing the process we learned a lot about about Parmigiana cheese including that it is a perfect food once ...

I have a lot of entries to fill in from the last few days, but the internet place is closing in 15 minutes and I wanted to get in a quick message, especially to those who I have been frantically calling today. Last night, after a gorgeous day at the 'seaside', the five of us girls all went out to dinner. Instead of salad, I splurged on the scallops, which as you all know, are my absolute favorite. But the end of the meal, I had a few "bug bites ...

... for dinner. It&#8217;s a beautiful spa town and smells good! I took a long walk through the park and had a Gran Marnier on the patio. Peggy had Amaretto which pleased the bartender/host. He didn&#8217;t like my ordering a French liqueur! The hotel was one of the nicest on our tour. <br><br>We left our window open and it was actually cold when we got up!