Reno Centese, Italy

We were blessed to have friends in Italy to stay with.  We actually met these friends randomly in Wuhan, China.  They lived in the same giant apartment complex as we do.  We met them actually after we had only been in Wuhan for a couple of weeks.  We then began close friends.  It is wonderful and  our children play together.  They have 3 children and are expecting their 4th with a month.  Really we love them!! We really just wanted to hang out with them and see a little of Italy.  And that is just what we did.  For the first few days we ate at some restaurants and ran errands with them.  It was nice for the girls to have children to play with and just relax.   The first week we just went site seeing and really the girls didn't have a lot of time to just play.  They fed us good Italian food and we enjoyed excellent company.
Italy is not the most friendly place we have been.  Really.  There is not explanations of their building or site seeing places and I don't mean in English.  The Italian are clueless as to the history and details of things because they are just not posted anywhere.  That was frustrating for me.  I wanted to know how old things were what they were used for and so on.  Germany was wonderful for that!!  
On Saturday we went into Ferrara and say an Italian castle.  It had a mote and everything!  We were able to walk around and experience the culture.  We only spent a few hours there at sunset so the picture are scares and not very good.

This is one of the churches in Ferrara.

We had to get a picture of a pizza place.  This is very common to see.

Beautiful Italian streets of Ferrara

A Church in Ferrar

All the kids and me. 

Wonderful art on every building!

Approaching the castle as dusk.

The Estes Castle.

This castle even still has a moat around it.  COOL!

A cool looking torch as we entered in the square of the castle grounds.

This castle is famous for the Estes Cannon and we think these must be some of the cannon balls.  They were all over the grounds.

Here we are again posing on the cannon balls.

Jasmin conquered the stack.

We think this is a replica of one of the cannons.

So then on Sunday Marzia's very traditional Italian momma made tortellini.  From scratch.   She made the pasta, rolled it out, cut it and then stuffed it with an amazing filling of cheese and meat which she made from scratch.  She TRIED to teach us.  It is hard! 

Next to me is Marzia's mom and in the background our friends Marzia and Cristiano.

This is some beef that we treated ourselves too.  Yummy tender beef.  We do not see much of it in China.

We had a wonderful time with our friends!  We ate at a few local restaurants with them and the children PLAYED a lot!  Every night we were there we were up past 10:00pm having fun.  One thing that we learned about Italian is that they eat late.  It took our girls a couple days to adjust.  I mean they don't eat dinner until sometime after 8:00pm.  We usually eat around 5:30 and are going to bed at 8.  We had to do a lot of snacking.