Cinco de Mayo (our California roots are showing...)

• We got up at a reasonable time and headed over to the Bar Gallieno for our due caffè and Today in History.
• It wasn't raining, so we went into L'Arena, the first time this trip. They already had the summer seats up, as well as the stage. It seems early to be settting up for the opera season (it starts the end of June), but there are other concerts. Despite generally thinking that the seats and stage spoil the view (though not the opera experience!), we did get some good pictures of the seats, in addition to our usual bevy of pictures of and from L'Arena.
• We went back to the hotel to get some help with lunch and dinner reservations — it's still hard for C to speak and understand Italian on the phone. For lunch, we really just wanted to know if the place was open, but they reserved a table for us anyway, which turned out to be a good thing. It took us two tries for dinner. The first place, one new to us, was fully booked. The hotel clerk said that it was good, but that it was starting to cater more to tourists. So, we went with another one of our old standbys. When the clerk made the reservation, he used a typical Italian method of spelling, using cities whose names start with the appropriate letter: Como, Udine, Livorno, upsilon (not a city, but a Greek letter, since "y" is not an Italian letter).
• The lunch restaurant is outside the main walls, the only one we go to that is, on the way to the purported Juliet's Tomb. When we got to the restaurant, they asked if the hotel had called for us, and then showed us to a reserved table. The rest of the room was already set up, as it turned out, for two Chinese tour groups. When we had gone to this restaurant last summer, the only other customers were a few locals speaking the local language (or "dialect" as they call it). A big difference! We wondered if they are becoming more touristy. The food was still good, though. The waiter humored C and spoke Italian, even though he had spent 25 years on cruise ships, and even knew Vancouver! L felt that she was "channeling Aunt Mary" as she chowed down on the pizza dough bread appetizer. Aunt Mary loved bread...
• On to the PAM supermarket for some wine (the wine shop we went to the other day was too fancy for us) and a hot barley drink powder (orzo).
• Back to the hotel, where we chatted with the same desk clerk who had made the reservations. While we were chatting, another clerk came in and recognized C. And Thursday another clerk, who just went on maternity leave, stopped by and recognized us as well. We're just regulars, even if we only go once a year.
• We headed back out after our afternoon siesta and headed to a chocolate shop in the middle of a sunshower. They had all kinds of flavored chocolate; we did not get the cannabis flavored one...
• We spent the rest of the afternoon strolling along the Adige river. One interesting thing was a small storefront called PAD, Pay and Display (http://www.payanddisplay.it/ (in Italian)). The idea is that you have a few small things to display, either for sale or just because, not enough to have your own store. PAD rents you a display cube and you can display your stuff. Now for this to make sense for you, you have to have some reason to think that people will actually go in and look at your stuff. In our case, you would be disappointed, because we didn't actually go into the store. But it seems like an interesting, if not necessarily viable, idea.
• Then it was back to our afternoon hangout place for an aperitivo and more people watching.
• Back to the hotel for a bit to rest up for dinner. L still hasn't bought the €275 underwear we saw in a shop window on Via Mazzini (the ritzy shopping street) ...
• Dinner at another place that made us change our rating system, since it is also better food than the sentimental favorite, al Duca. One thing we got hooked on last summer was cheese plates with jam or honey. One of the cheeses tonight seemed like it was made to go with the jam — a perfect match. Another cheese, which we liked, was one that had been soaked in amarone wine as part of its aging. When we ordered the dessert wine, recioto, the server mentioned Veronese cookies to go with it, like cantucci and Vin Santo in Tuscany. What was odd was that the recioto was served in more of a bowl/mug, not in a glass. We did not dunk the cookies. The recioto also wasn't as sweet as last night's.
• Of course we went back to the Piazza Bra for more L'Arena watching. There was an annoying group of what were probably American high school students singing songs, some from musicals, very loudly and not particularly well. Do they not notice that nobody else is acting that way?