Happy Easter!

It's almost spring!

 Today was Easter!!! Even in Italy we got gifts. We left out our Ikea eggs to receive gifts from the easter bunny. The things that I received included a deer, some egg chocolates, a fish chocolate,and a strange Kinder Egg (it's a small egg with a toy prize inside).

My easter goodies

Usually, Kinder Eggs are hollow chocolate shells about two and a half inches tall with a plastic toy to build inside. This one though, you had to first pull in half, like so (bellow).

Kinder Egg in half

The left side with the question marks has a spoon. At the time, I couldn't understand why, but opening it, I found yellow and green plastic pieces. I then followed the instructions given inside and built a three-wheeled rubber band car. When you push the green plastic tab on the end it zooms off. I have to say, min was much cooler than Sean's (an egg-holder) or Griffin's (a Monsters Inc keychain).

My prize

But even weirder was the chocolate. Instead of hard chocolate there was a Nutella-like substance (For all I know, it actually could be Nutella. I think that both Nutella and Kinder Egg are owned by the same company.) On top were two chocolate balls.

inside the chocolate half

the inside had two layers of Nutella-esque stuff

Wow. That was a lot about a Kinder Egg.... Moving on.

For breakfast we had a traditional Italian sweetbread. It was shaped like a cross, and I'm told it tasted like a good version of fruitcake (never had a fruitcake before). Inside, the bread was soft and had dried fruit inside. On top were sugar chunks.... Yum.

cut up sweetbread for breakfast....

We (Dad, Julie, Griffin, Sean, and I) decided to spend the day in Parco del Valentino (see my previous post, Parco del Valentino). To explore the park, we rented a four-person bicycle which Griffin sat in the middle of Sean and Dad in the front. 

All of us (and my hand) in the bike

After returning the bike, we decided to go inside the medieval castle (also see my previous post, Parco del Valentino). We bought the tickets that just happened to be one euro today and were told that we must go with a guided tour at four. It wasn't four yet, so we left the castle gates to wait. Waiting, we watched balloons of copied characters be sold and made up funny names for them. Like the knockoff Lightening McQueen was Thunder McKing, Marlin and Namo(Marlin and Nemo), Hello Catty(Hello Kitty), Princess Poach (Princess Peach), Tooty Bird (Tweety Bird), and more.

Knockoff character balloons in the park

We then, after I explored the fountain with Julie (this is in a previous post as well), we went for our tour. In the castle, there was only non-flash photography and I'm not allowed to put it on the internet. My pictures really weren't that good anyway. The castle very typical medieval- dark, cold, and holding tapestries with absolutely no perspective. I did manage to get a picture of nice flowers in the "kitchen garden"(see bellow).

Pretty

The town had a couple of gift shops containing some very random things. The town was meant to be a representation of the middle ages in Europe, but in the gift shop there were katanas(Japanese swords). Hmm...

Katanas

Lastly, I would like to share my collection of egg pictures. Here in Turin, it is tradition to get large, hollow chocolate eggs on Easter, all of which are packaged very beautifully. The ones bellow are about half of the ones I saw. The large pictures are my favorites.

Happy Easter everyone!
Ciao!
-Hailey