Homeschooling in the NKY: Our first day alone, without Joe

It happened. Joe had to return to work. He has been off work since December 17. I'm dealing with it. You get accustomed to people being around all the time. Luckily, we had plans to explore today so it wasn't as huge as I thought it would be.

We woke up late. By late, I mean late. I did not wake up until 10:30, which is half an hour past breakfast buffet time. I finally woke the kids up at 11:00 so we could get ready to leave for our walk to lunch. They took it in stride. I guess when you get 12+ hours of sleep, you feel pretty happy. I wouldn't know. I got about 7ish hours. It was plenty, tho. I felt pretty good all day.

Around 12:15, we headed out. We walked through the park adjacent to the suite and it had many cool things. Here are a few pics.

Cool Statue #1

Kids at base of Cool Statue #1

Valentino Castle - looks like they are fixing the gate

We then headed to Poormanger, a baked potato spot that had many toppings of which to choose. We had to wait about 20 minutes for a table.

They are even cute waiting patiently

The sign so I'd remember the name ;)

Did you know that many places in Torino do not accept credit cards? Yeah, me neither. I only had 12,90 EU on me and they wouldn't take my credit card...so I had to barter, slightly. My bill came to 13EU and I told him I only had 12,90 EU. He was gracious and allowed me to pay the reduced rate. Unfortunately, we were all starving. We missed breakfast, we had a light lunch, what to do with growing children? Lol. No worries! We had a snack when we returned to the suite.

From the restaurant, we decided to walk to a local piazza we could see from Poormanger. I think it was Piazza San Carlo, or not. Oh my goodness, we saw at least 4 piazzas today. Anyway, this piazza was under construction so I wasn't able to get good pics. Honestly, I can't even find the pic I took. I will say, Little J asked if there were going to be naked people on the statue yet again. This led to an interesting discussion about nakedness by the clan. If I weren't trying to educate my children on different cultures, I might have been in stitches. They come up with some hilarious things.

We headed south to see the next piazza. I'll name it Piazza San Giocomo val J-names. Yep, I like it. Honestly, this was likely Piazza Cavour. Yes, that's it! And I looked on the map. The earlier mentioned Piazza was Piazza Carlo Emanuele II. Here are some pics from Piazza Carlo Emanuele II.

First Statue Pic

Second Statue Pic

Oh look, another statue!

The Gandhi statue brings up a good point. Everywhere you look, there is graffiti. Buildings that have been around for centuries, graffiti-ed. Statues commemorating famous people (primarily Italians), graffiti-ed. Bus stops, graffiti-ed. It is so strange to us, as foreigners. We see these buildings/statues/etc as part of history. I think they might be viewed differently here. They've been around forever, so they are not seen as the treasures that we see them as. Just my two cents. On that topic, here is a really cool building that is graffiti-ed. It looks sort of Baroque style, right?!?! I'm not exactly an expert on architecture.

Look at the bottom of the building. Yes, that is spray paint. Lots of it.

Across the way was a cool park or piazza or something. It had fountains spraying around a statue. Of course, I missed taking pics of the fountain. Here are a few pics of more statues.

You can't see the fountains because this dude was in the way.

A cool church we could see from fountain park/piazza

We then headed toward the Fiume Po so we could try to find the Medieval Village we set out to find. Unfortunately, we never found it. Joe thinks it is farther north than we went. But here are a few pics of our time on the Po and in the park.