Verona days three and four

Wednesday: 'work day'

After school and a lunchtime walk to Piazza delle Erbe, I spent the afternoon in the monastery, diligently reviewing Italian vocabulary and verb constructions.

Highlight: I discovered the bakery Alpigusto, which sells not only Bavarian pretzels, but also Vinschgauer, a type of bread that I love, seasoned with fennel and caraway seeds.

Thursday: another 'work day'

It is cool and cloudy and I am a bit tired from the past few days.
On the way home, I spend a long time searching for a postcard for my parents who don't have internet, which turns out to be not so easy. Firstly, it's not yet tourist season, and secondly, in the age of selfies and blogs, no one sends postcards anymore. The few cards I find have already faded in the sun and/or turned yellow, and the style of the photographs is reminiscent of the 70s, which is not to my taste. I have to choose the lesser of two evils.

Much more enjoyable is my visit to a bookstore that I happen to come across. I want to buy a book in simple Italian to improve my reading comprehension, and I have a children's or young adult book in mind. However, I quickly choose Simone Moro's 'la voce del ghiaccio' - a simple narrative of alpinistic heroism, not a literary masterpiece. As a counterbalance to so much testosterone and because he passed away a few days ago, I also take a book by Thich Nhat Hanh that I had previously read in German a few years ago.

This time our homework is not a grammar exercise, which usually comes easily to my math-trained brain, but a description of a photo - which is already difficult for me in German. Well, you can't get something for nothing...