Note: I’m still importing old blog posts and this is the last post on my old blog from Apr 4.

Simona and I were scheduled to volunteer at the cinema last night, but with her in France, I had to take on the crowds all by my lonesome for the first time. The cinema is a small community-owned theater that’s relatively new and they show movies 5 days a week. The paid staff is limited to the projectionists and a manager and they depend on a group of volunteers to run the ticket booth before each showing, which is usually once a day. In return for spending 20 minutes taking tickets a few times a month, we can go see films for free, which works for me.

I had the luck of volunteering on a night that they were showing Letters from Iwo Jima. It was a great film, and by being subtitled, I picked up some new handy phrases that I would’ve normally missed like “Sbrigarti!”, which means “Git’r‘dun” in Italian.

We went off to see a castle called Montechiarugolo, which is located right on the edge of where Parma and Reggio Emilia meet. We had never really gone into Parma, except to pass through it, so it was a surprise at how much different it is than Reggio. Large estates dot the countryside in greater numbers than I had seen anywhere else. The Montechiarugolo castle itself is located in the small colorful town of the same name, and is only open a few hours on Saturdays and Sundays.

When we arrived, the guide told us about a festival at the castle the next day where admission would be free, and food abound. The free admission wasn’t enough to convince me to drive all the way back, but the free food, on the other hand…

We hopped back in the car and followed the signs to another nearby castle called Torrechiara, which is the type of castle I had thought didn’t exist in this area. It’s extremely well preserved, from the high imposing stone walls down to the frescoes covering everything but the floor. It made our little castles of Reggio not seem too impressive anymore.

Each province only advertises what there is to see in their own area, so like two explorers discovering a new land, we were excited to find so many new places to go and visit. As Sunday came around, our trip back to Montechiarugolo was put on hold as we were buried in half a foot of snow. Hopefully that’s the end of our short winter and we’ll get a chance to return. With Kirk here, maybe we’ll make it back this weekend.