Of course, my city has its own Castle :)

Brescia and I

Hi Friends!!

I'll start with a lead-off from last week ... I walked through the mall last Monday to pick something up for lunch and of course [!] I ran into one of my Gelato store owner friends! Haha. So he brought me to the pizza place that his friend works at and that is where I had lunch : ) .

The same mall between my apartment and my school has "Original Language Movies" on Tuesdays and Older movies on Thursdays for a discounted price. One of the English teachers at the school and I went to see Robin Hood with Russell Crowe on Tuesday afternoon ... the idea was to invite her fifth year English students to see it with us but after we made the plan, she forgot to tell them about it! So it was just us two. Regardless, I have a list of the movies for Tuesdays and Thursdays for the rest of the year so I can check out any new ones to see.

View of the city of Brescia from the Castle. The large building is the Loggia and you can also make out a tower and the duomo in the back.

 This weekend, my older roommate's husband has been visiting from Palermo and on Saturday we went on a guided tour of the Castle in Brescia! It was a tour put together by the "Spelunking or caving" Association and even though they have a more "adventurous" caving tour, we did the "classic" tour easy for everyone to do and so we saw different watch towers and went underground where they have excavated various rooms and staircases. We went in one of the towers that used to be a prison and could read on the stone walls where prisoner's etched their names or how long they had been there.

Part of the Castle from within the grounds

Yes, I crawled through this hole. It lead into a very large room where Brescian people used to keep water? And then they used to store oil there?

My oldest roommate Daniella and I!

 After, we got a ride back down to the city center and walked through one of the nicest areas of shops and restaurants. Continuing to the historical center, we walked through the Duomo Vecchio or the old main church as opposed to the Duomo Nuovo the new main church. It is really interesting, less built up than the new duomo and also round! Underneath, you can walk through some roman columns found from an old church that the Duomo Vecchio [the old main church] was built on. So that certainly shows something our tour guide told us: Brescia is not a city with a preserved history from one single era, but you can find monuments from the ancient era of Roman Brixia to the unification of Italy. There's the new duomo in the center of the city and next to it the old [and round duomo] underneath which there are remains from an even older church!

After our jam-packed day, I found Halloween cookies in the grocery store!! Maybe this means my students might know a little about Halloween already when I do my lessons about it in a couple of weeks?

Pumpkin cookies :)