So Friday was a very fun day in Ventimille, Italy and Menton, France. We meant to stop at other cities like Villefranche but we accidentally spent way too much time in the first two cities...whoops! It's okay, its only a 10 Euro train ticket for roundtrip and you can get off and on in any city as many times as you want for the day, so we will probably do it again to spend time in other cities. But anyways on Fridays theres a little market in Ventimille and so we spent time looking around there. We of course had gelato. (I may or may not have had it twice within a 4 hour timespan :p) And I also found some cute things (not to be named because I know my family reads this blog) to bring back to the US. This is the beach where I FINALLY learned how to skip rocks thanks to my genius teacher friend Caitlin. This beach will forever be in my heart because I've tried to learn for years :) Check that off my bucket list. Speaking of bucket lists, I have plans with someone to try parasailing sometime this trip as long as it doesn't cost a million euro! Yay! Pictures from Italy to come in another post, thanks for being patient :)
On another note, FOOD. I've had so much in the last two days its crazy! Today is mothers day in France. Yesterday we had a celebration with my host mom and dad and grandma, and the son and daughter of my host mom with their respective spouses and daughters. My host mom's son is exactly like my Uncle Dave it is seriously insane. Always messing with the kids, messing with the cake, making American jokes to me, andddd they look a lot alike! Well anyways I'm going to try and list what we ate: First we had cantaloupe, pizza (way better than papa murphys let me tell ya), and really yummy thinly sliced ham. Then we had two different types of potatoes and a local dish called polente (like Italian pollenta). Thenn was the actual main meal: beef. and more beef. and more beef. We had two pieces each the size of a piece of paper and 2 inches thick. I've never seen so much meat on one grill before. It was left really really red but I realized I actually like it better than how much we cook it in the states. Then we had the cheese and bread (I didn't mention that we went through 6 baguettes, the bread you take to clean each plate each 'round' for example the olive oil type stuff oozing out of the pizza). I originally took my 2 favorites, but I didn't notice there were new more fancy special ones out for the celebration and by the time everyone had convinced me to try their favorites I ended up eating 6 different cheeses all about the size of a playing card. Whoa. I can't even start about the cakes. There were 2, one raspberry and one chocolate and ether was also a raspberry taste pie type thing. Needless to say, our meal was literally from 12 to 5 pm and I hardly ate dinner at 9 with my friends when I met up with them in the city. It doesn't stop though. Today we celebrated with my host grandma's brother (I think, the family relations here are crazy confusing), my moms brother, and one of the grandkids again. It was exactly the same amount of food but I don't feel like listing it all here. Amazing. I think I gained 4 pounds in the last 2 days. And I never want to eat ever again. The end.
