Venice

What an amazing city. Of course it's a complete tourist trap, which we usually resent, but in this case we make an exception. It just can't be beat! We stayed 2 nights there before coming back to Rome. We ate amazing food on this whole trip, explored art and history museums, churches, bridges, piazzas, neighborhoods and shops. The whole weekend (5 days! including Florence) was incredible and we all had so much fun together.

Burano was an especially colorful island which we loved.

Florence

Mom and Dad came the day after Debi left. To start off the visit we took the train the next morning to Florence and stayed there until Easter Sunday afternoon.

Last few photos of our time with Debi, almost 2 weeks ago now...
Here we are at the Vatican.
This one is especially precious. Love and miss her!

and my good looking husband at work :)

Colosseum, etc...

with our wonderful friend Debi!

Cooking Class

We took a Roman cooking class yesterday. It was technically part of John's birthday present. We had a lot of fun and learned a lot. The best thing was the Roman artichokes, and we made our own pasta. I'm hoping to perfect a couple of these recipes before we leave.
Besides that, the bar downstairs has had live music the past couple of nights, and with the perfect weather we've had our windows open, so we pretty much get a free concert in our apartment. Last night was a really good blues singer.

Here are a few pictures from our class.

Paris

We spent my birthday weekend in Paris. It was cold and drizzly, but it's Paris, so who cares! We ate crepes and croissants and macaroons, and we got a museum pass so we could visit a lot more sites than we would have otherwise. We squeezed a lot in to 3 days and we could have done more if I hadn't been deathly ill on the last day.
Here are the pictures.

Inside Notre Dame

and at the top of it

and now in front of the Louvre

at the Arc de Triomphe

Versailles

Sainte Chapelle

Eiffel Tower

Montmatre had amazing views of the whole city, unfortunately I was deliriously feverish at this point and wasn't making things easy on John either, so we didn't get many good shots.