Visitors Galore!!

It's been a super crazy few weeks here with the anticipation of our visitors arriving! Last weekend, D's parents, sister and her fiancé all came to visit us to celebrate my father-in-law's 50th Birthday. We had such a blast. Since D had two-a-day practices, I was solely in charge of the group activities. First, we went sightseeing around Venice and took a gondola ride that was beautiful (regardless of our candy-crush-addicted-gondolier who couldn't seem to put his phone away). Total atmosphere-kill, dude. The next day we went into Treviso, a nearby city that is really beautiful to shop and walk around in. On Sunday morning, we woke up and drove an hour and a half into Bologna where D was having an away game. We went early to be able to check out the city center before the game and I was pleasantly surprised by what a cool town it was. Whenever we travel around Italy, we always ask ourselves if we would like to live in that place, and my first impressions of Bologna were that I could definitely enjoy living there.  Luckily, we left early to head the 10 miles to the arena because it ended up taking us over 2 hours to get there!!! It was absolutely insane traffic and any well wishes and thoughts I had about Bologna were thrown out the window with my sanity.

This must have been during the gondolier's 30 second gaming hiatus

First night! Celebrating Virgis' 50th

With my Sister-in-Law

The arena in Bologna was really cool and a great atmosphere to play in. Unfortunately, we somehow got seated in front of the biggest idiot of all 11,000 humans in attendance and it took every fiber of my being to not turn around and punch him in the face. Amid forty solid minutes of him (purposely) screaming in my ear and throwing his hand in my face, I found composure in closing my eyes and imagining the next day's headlines reading "crazy american basketball wife goes to jail for hitting opposing team's fan" and after a quick pro/con balance, I decided to keep my hands to myself. We were down most of the game but ended up coming back and winning at the end and a simple smile to my friend behind me at the buzzer couldn't have felt any sweeter.

Not Pictured: Huge Idiot Behind Me

We had such an amazing time celebrating my father-in-laws birthday with their first trip to Italy and were super excited to surprise him with a car waiting for him back home. Overall we had a great visit together and I'm always amazed at how we can seem to communicate just fine in spite of our difficult language barrier. 

Now I'm anxiously awaiting my two best friends who arrive on Saturday for a week of sight seeing & debauchery!!! I'm so excited that they'll be here to celebrate Thanksgiving with me because it's usually a pretty bittersweet occasion over here. We have a big group of large, hungry basketball players to cook for so I hope they're ready to throw down in the kitchen. I'm sure my next blog post will be filled with hilarious & inappropriate anecdotes, so I'll be sure to keep tabs on them all.

Wishing everyone a happy & gracious Thanksgiving holiday filled with great food and quality time with family and friends (I know I'll be missing mine).