Trento by Night (with Christmas Lights)

Pretty self-explanatory... :)

In Trento... and Mercatino in Merano

On Sunday, we went to the park with Milena (and Amy and GP), and then had lunch before GP had to head out of town.  Then the rest of us headed up to the Mercatino in Merano.  It was really cute and served as a great opportunity to pick up a few last minute gifts.  Aside from the cold and the guys in scary suits, everyone had a great time.  (OK, Maya HATED the guys in the costumes and wanted to leave immediately upon seeing them.  Milena, on the other hand, wanted to play in the park until her hands turned into icicles.)

Thanksgiving in Italy

So Tim and Amy pulled off a great Thanksgiving feast.  We had about 18 people over, including three rambunctious 3-4 year olds.  It was as close as one can get to actually recreating Thanksgiving barring having a table we could all sit around.  It was also sprinkled with some novelties, including delicious salami and some Romanian palinka (WOW!).  While I'd pretend to be the puppet master, I did very little aside from clean up our apartment, and make deviled eggs and apple pie cookies.  The latter were, if I do say so myself, DELICIOUS.

Of course, since Tim was cooking, I took most of the photos.  So they're not very good.  But here's a sampling of the event:

Maya and Milena on "actual Thanksgiving..."  Amy and I prepped the apple pie cookies on Thursday night:

The turkey in the oven (with plenty of room to spare):

We subjected the Europeans to the Macy's day parade and some football.  The latter was preferred.

The feast doubled as a celebration for Stefan, who successfully defended his PhD thesis yesterday:

The happy chefs and their piece de resistance:

My plate: everything but the "cranberry" jelly:

The table AFTER the first round:

The apple pie cookies.  They're much cuter in person.  And did I mention they were delicious?

Stefan was a really good sport:

Castel Toblino

On Monday, Tim headed back out to the area where we had hiked over the weekend.  He did a couple of hikes around the lake and cliffs surrounding the Castel Toblino.  It sounded like it was the perfect day for it, and he got a lot of great shots.  He trimmed his 400+ pictures to just over 100.  I trimmed it a little further to only 72, but I felt like I was breaking his heart each time I cut one.  So you get 72.  :)  Oh, and these are in chronological order from the  morning (around 9:30am) until he left at 3:40pm.  That's right. Those last pictures are taken at 3:40 in the afternoon.  It gets dark EARLY around here in the winter.