Blogs from Friuli-Venezia Giulia, Italy, Europe - page 9

Benjamin and Joshua woke up to a reasonable haul of chocolate this morning, despite our travelling status, thank to the kindness of Aunt Mine and others. After breakfast we headed over to the farm to join Giovanin and their family for church. The local church has a reputation for painfully long services, so thankfully we were going to another church in a different town. Compared to the church in Flaibano, this church was quite cheerful looking inside and out, brightly lit with morning sun. Though the service was entirely in Italian, the structure of it was familiar enough for us to follow along. Back at the house, Evy set up an easter egg hunt for Joshua, Franceso, and his small cousin Stefano. Unfortunately, Pia didn't realize that Evy had done this and started collecting the chocolates ... read more

This is a market today in the neighbouring town of Spilimbergo, so Evy and I got up early and biked the 10 km—to the horror of relatives when they later learned of this. This part of Italy is very flat, and the biggest obstacle seems to be the occasional headwind. We had the GPS mounted on one of the bikes so it wasn't that hard to find, though there are some less than bike friendly parts of the highway, particularly where the bridge crosses Italy's largest river, the Tagliamento. The market was not all that different from the one we had been to a few days earlier in Codroipo. There was the usual collection of food and clothing stalls and even a pet stall selling, amongst other things, chipmunks. We bought a few things and then ... read more

Joshua seems to really be enjoying his bicycle and small town freedom. This morning he headed off and bought the bread for breakfast, Though armed with a few words in Friulano, the store people thought he was german and with some effort in English on their part, he complete the transaction. After breakfast we took a bike ride to the town cemetery and found the graves of Evy's grandmother and grandfather along with many other relatives. Graveyards here seem to all be walled and gated. They are relatively small and tightly packed with graves, so much so that they tend to dig up the graves after 25 years and intern the bones, freeing the plot for another arrival. Despite this, both these graves were still there though more than 25 years has past. After this, we ... read more

We haven't really figured out what we plan to do for transportation here in Europe. Ideally, we would like to buy a car like we did in New Zealand and sell it in a few months, but we are also looking at renting a vehicle as many places Evy would like to take us can not be reached by public transport. With this first goal in mind, Giovanin picked us up at the house about 9:30 and drove us to Codroipo. We checked at a few car lots before finding a place that rents. The prices were not nearly as bad as what we had seen in Florence. Here they were about 30 Euro per day compared to 60 or 70 there. We decided we would likely come back next week and rent for perhaps a ... read more

This was our first pleasure trip to Europe and what better place to start than Venice in Italy! We landed at the airport, took a shuttle to the vaporato and then checked into the hotel almost at midnight. We were hungry and stepped out to have dinner and lo and behold we saw 3000 people chatting away to glory in a square, it looked most surreal! In the next 2 days there we we strunned by the beauty of the place - St. Mark's square, the Grand Canal, Lido beach, just traveling by vaporato within Venice was fun! Time passes by so soon in this land :)... read more