New friends!

Bill and I have spent yesterday and today with our new group of friends from the high school in Trapani.  Yesterday we planned to have dinner with them...little did we know, "dinner" meant not our normal 5:30-6:00, but 9:15pm.  Shocker.  We were a little hungry.  However, we went to a great pizzeria with them and ordered some amazing pizza...the best we've had so far.  After dinner, they took us for a walk to an ice cream shop.  They ordered some AMAZING ice cream for us and we were so excited to be trying something new!  Then they took us to a pub nearby (this is common to do after dinner..."dinner, a walk, the pub, sleep").  They were so welcoming and insisted on paying for EVERYTHING the entire night.  Bill and I didn't spend a penny.  So nice!  We had lots of fun, although, only one of them really knows how to speak English, so our Italian is being forced to improve.

Today they took us to the "saline" which was absolutely breathtaking.  The saline is the place where salt is collected from small pools of ocean water that evaporate.  They took us there right at sunset, so the reflection on the pools of the islands and the sky was incredible.  Since it was a little chilly, they then took us back into town to get some cioccolata calda italiana (Italian hot chocolate).  We thought, "Okay, hot chocolate...that will be nice.  It's something we have at home, but whatever."  Boy were we wrong.  This was truly "hot chocolate."  It was chocolate and cream melted and covered with whipped cream and some kind of chocolate candy.  SO DELICIOUS.  We're going to try to re-create it at home.

During hot chocolate, they asked us if they could make dinner for us on Tuesday at our apartment in exchange for American Brownies.  Funny what other cultures think is great.  Something that we think of as nothing special, they think is absolutely wonderful.  So, we agreed and since our apartment has no oven, our friend Martina is going to take the batter over to her Grandmother's house nearby.  That will be a sight!
Our friends are great and they have offered their homes to us the next time we visit.  Their parents were even upset that they didn't ask us to stay with them sooner so that we wouldn't have to stay in the apartment alone and spend money.  How wonderful!  We are most certainly blessed and this trip has been more than we could have hoped for.