It Snowed!

This is what we woke up to on Saturday morning....SNOW! It totally feels like winter now. Let the holidays begin! I guess this area rarely gets snow and my Italian neighbor said it had been many years since they had seen snow this far down in the valley, usually we just see it in the mountains. Our winters are usually just a lot of rain and then the rain freezes into ice. Dustin and I both loved seeing the snow and it totally felt like home!

Looking out our front window.

I had to take a picture of all the palm trees covered in snow. It's just funny to see and I figured my dad would like it :)

This is our Italian neighbor trying to shovel is walkway with his plastic dust pan. It was hilarious.

Merry Christmas!

This year I was kind of a slacker about getting our Christmas stuff up. I think it was because we just got done unpacking and putting our house together. Also, since our house is pretty small, I didn't want to have to move furniture out of the living room to the garage just to put up the tree. So instead we bought a small three foot tree and put it on our end table. It worked out great! I think that it is going to work out perfect while we are living in Europe.

Our Tree

My Korean Nativity that I bought last January in Osan

My new Santa that I bought at the Christmas market in Austria. You are supposed to put an incense cone in the bottom and he smokes out of his mouth. I'm not sure that I'm going to use it though because I don't want his beard to turn black.

Willow Tree Nativity that Dustin bought me for Christmas two years ago.

So these are pictures of our third trip to Venice. We love Venice because every time that you go there, there is something new to see and a different path to wonder.

Rialto Bridge

We came across a cool area that was evidence of Venice sinking. This building had a make-shift bridge to the door because it was flooded.

Just around the other side of that building

Standing in nasty water! (believe me Venice does not have crystal blue clean water!) But we still love it here.

First time out of Italy!

About two weeks ago we went to the Christmas Market in Salzburg, AUSTRIA! It was Amazing! We totally fell in LOVE with this city!

We signed up to go to the Christmas market not realizing how much there is to see in Salzburg. This is the city that they filmed the Sound of Music and the birthplace of Mozart.

Overlooking the city

Christmas Market

Salzach River

Hohensalzburg Fortress. We decided to walk up to the Fortress instead of paying for the tram just to find out you had to pay to get in anyway!

Yep, we hiked to that!

The Nonnberg Abbey that they filmed the Sound of Music

Can't wait to go back!

October and Halloween!

Here are a few of the things that we have been up to lately....

The Venzone Pumpkin Festival was about three weeks ago. It was awesome! We really want to go back next year. Everything in the city was decorated with pumpkins and cats. They had the best pumpkin treats. All we did that day was eat. We had pumpkin donuts, pumpkin pastries, and the best of them all was the pumpkin muffins. We liked them so much we bought four extra to bring home.

Venzone is a small medival city in northern Italy.

This medival band was good but they needed to learn a few more songs! We had to listen to the same two songs for six hours. By the end of the day I didn't want to hear bagpipes or drums ever again! It reminded me of the songs in Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Actually...the entire festival reminded me of that movie!

A couple of days before Halloween I made Dustin decorate Halloween cupcakes with me. Here he is filling frosting bags. We delivered these cupcakes to our neighbors in our apartment building. The next day we saw one of our Italian neighbors and she thanked us for the muffins. It was hilarious! We just said your welcome and laughed about it when we got in the car.

Some of our cute cupcakes. Okay, not ours. These are mine :)

Dustin's cool black widow

On Halloween we went to the Gardaland Amuzement Park. We had a lot of fun even though it was freezing and very busy. The park is located right next to Lake Garda which is about two hours away from where we live.

They had these cool machines that made ghosts out of bubbles that would fly around the park. It was awesome. Here is one ghost coming out of the machine.

And flying away...

They were so much fun to watch and I've never seen anything like this before. It took me forever to get a picture of one because they kept turning and floating away. I finally got this good picture of one in the sky.

AH HA HA HA HA. That's all I have to say....

41st Annual Barcolana Regatta

This particular weekend we didn't have any plans so I searched Google for "Festivals in October in Northern Italy" and found a website entirely in Italian. From what I could gather there was going to be a sailboat race in Trieste, which was about an hour and a half from Aviano, on the border of Italy and Slovenia and on the Adriatic Sea. So we drove out to Trieste trusting that our GPS would take us to the right place and hoping that there really would be a festival that day.
What we found was amazing! There definetly was a festival that weekend and over 300,000 people showed up for it. Trieste is a gorgous city with amazing views.

Driving into Trieste, Italy

We were able to watch a nightime sailboat race.

The Trieste town square was beautiful at night!

We noticed that they were setting up a stage in the center of the square so we decided to stay and see what was going on. Little did we know that we were about to see a free concert from one of Italy's biggest pop stars, Cesare Cremonini. He was amazing! We didn't understand a word he was saying but he was very talented. There are videos on YouTube of him singing so you should check him out and let me know what you think!