Da quanto tempo!

Well, again, lots of stuff to update! My mom and dad have come and gone now, but we had tons of adventures and good times in the short time they were here. We explored Bologna, Venice, Florence and Ravenna. I have now had my first REAL University of Bologna exam, and survived. I only have one class left to go, which will be over in about 3 weeks, and Ross will arrive a few days later! We made a trip to Trento up in the Dolomite Mountains and will be traveling to Siena in a couple of days. Last but not least, our plans for our big European endeavor are just about done!

So we’ll start with my parents visit. We spent the first 3 days relaxing and sight-seeing in Bologna. On Saturday we went to a big indoor market, Mercato delle Erbe, where we scored quite the selection of fresh fruits and veggies, cheese, olives and fish. After cooking up a lovely meal together at my apartment we set out to explore a bit more and, of course, grab some gelato! There was some interesting entertainment in Piazza Maggiore as we passed through, a German guy (or possibly Austrian, couldn’t tell, just heard the accent in his Italian!) was doing a big of a comic routine. He was pretty good, but we decided to take our leave and head to dinner at what I like to call, Limoncello Place (aka Nino’s Ristorante).

Now Nino’s has earned its name by ending every one of our meals with a big bottle of limoncello on the house. They didn’t let us down when my parents came either, in fact we ended the meal with 2 ½ bottles of limoncello on the house! We shared a great meal and even some laughs with our waiter (who resembles Gigi Buffon – goalie for the Italian national soccer team, sort of a god here… scary).

Sunday brought another beautiful day and we took advantage. We began by sharing a lovely breakfast outside at a café in quiet piazza near Piazza Maggiore. We then took the scenic route to Giardini Margherita, one of the most popular places to be on a beautiful Bolognese day. Giardini Margherita is a park just on the outside of the center where people go to run, play soccer, study, play music, roller blade, eat gelato, play basketball – you get the idea, you can pretty much do whatever you want! They even have mini go-karts for little kids!
Mom and Dad not only enjoyed the park, but the walk there. We took a more main street for a little while, but then I took them down one of the smaller side-streets for the rest of the way there. It’s so strange that after being here for 4 months some of the things I noticed originally have just become norms, but when I walked around with my parents and saw them looking around in awe at everything we passed, it came back to me. I am in Italy and these are not the norms for me – marble sidewalks, extravagant porticos, thousand year-old buildings. When you see them every day you start to take them for granted.

Sunday night, Easter, we went to Flor’s and cooked up a great big meal for those of us who were still in Bologna for the day. It was really great, extremely international. Flor, Laura Davey (from Chicago), Laura Phillips (from New Jersey) and her French roommate, Laetitia, and her Spanish roommate Rosalba, along with Laetitia’s friend Caroline (also from France) and Laura’s other friend Josh, who goes to Cornell with Laura but was visiting from his study abroad in Copenhagen. We all shared a great meal, which was cooked for the most part by my dad, and great discussions. It was a really nice meal and nice night.

The original plan for Monday was to head to Ravenna, but we were all pretty tired from a late night the night before. Instead we took our time and eventually hopped on a bus that took us out to the beginning of the hike up to San Luca, the church on the hill. We made it up just in time; they closed the gates 15 minutes after we had made it up! The view from the top is breathtaking in so many ways. You can see out of the hills, out over the city and beyond, and we were lucky enough to be up at the top on a day when the sun hit the church in just a way that made it look like it was glowing. The hike up always seems a bit long, but it’s worth it when you get to the top.

Tuesday was the first big excursion: Venezia! We got our vaparetto passes right away and found our water bus out to Murano. The ride out to the island was really cool, great views of Venice and other islands. Murano itself was much more commercialized than I had hoped it would be, the main canals are lined with glass shop after glass shop, it’s hard to pick out the ones that are special and worth stopping in. We did manage to find a couple though where the glass artisans were working in the backs of the shops and where the glass was clearly of higher quality and different from the other chintzy shops along the way.

We headed back to the mainland after ducking down a couple of side streets so narrow we couldn’t even extend our arms out straight! Next stop was St. Mark’s. It is just as beautiful the second, or even third, time you see it. It is so ornate, there isn’t a corner left undecorated. We went up to the top this time and I’m so glad because the view out over the square and the water is gorgeous. From St. Mark’s we hopped back on the vaparetto and took it out to Lido to get some dinner and we had a fabulous dinner, though we lost track of time a bit and ended up missing our train, but we really enjoyed our ride back to the station. The sun was setting over Venice and the day was still beautiful.

We relaxed at a café/bar and had some drinks together, reminiscing about the wonderful day we had just spent in Venice while we waited for the next train to roll in at 11:30.
Wednesday took us to Ravenna, lovely little Ravenna. I can’t get enough of this little city. It is so rich and full of history, yet it has not been lost to tourists and therefore retains all of its charm. Plus, it helps that it’s one of the only places where they have soy milk at all of the cafés! We did a little of the tourist activities (i.e. mosaics, Dante’s burial site), but for the most part we really just enjoyed the streets of Ravenna.

We started with a good lunch, outside of course accompanied by one of the best wines we’d had yet, and afterward we headed to the tourist center to pick up the free bikes they offer to tourists. These are, of course, far from top-of-the-line bikes, but they were fun. Bit heavy on the front end, but we got used to it after wobbling for the first minute or two. We enjoyed beautiful mosaics, centuries old buildings and quite a few soy lattes before heading back to Bologna.

Thursday brought another big excursion: Florence. This was my first time to Florence as well as my dad’s; Mom was the only veteran here! Our first stop was L’Accademia to see Michelangelo’s infamous David. It really is everything and more than you expect it to be. The statue is beautiful and huge!

From there we headed to the Duomo, stopping to get lunch along the way. We were a little disappointed at first by the view you get of the Duomo from inside the church, you can really only see little slivers. We discovered, however, that there were people up at the top of the dome on the outside and my dad and I took that long hike up. It is 8 euro a person and we were a little skeptical, but went for it anyways because we figured the view from up there out over the city would be magnificent, and it was. We discovered on the way up that we hadn’t paid only for the view out over the city (which in and of itself would have been worth it), but for an up-close and personal view of the entire dome. We were able to see such intricate details and it was really great.

We then headed back down to meet my mom and get some gelato before continuing in the direction of the Ponte Vecchio. We hid out under cover for a bit since it was raining cats and dogs in a piazza (don’t remember the name, but I’m sure my dad does!), it was right by the Uffizi. There were statues galore and each one of them was great.

The Ponte Vecchio itself was a bit disappointing, but we think maybe some of the vendors that may be there regularly had packed up for the day because of the weather. We crossed and found a restaurant right on the river to have a really nice dinner. It was so so sooo good. Our waiter, Nino from Sardegna, made some incredible recommendations. Mom and Dad toasted their 25th anniversary, congratulations on 25 years and finally making it to Italy together! J
So now comes the fun part of the story of Florence: our 11:30 train that actually left at 10:30… yes, that’s right, I accidently read the times wrong and we showed up at the station 45 minutes after our train had already left for Bologna. It gets better. The next train didn’t leave until 1:50 a.m., from the station on the other side of town.

We ended up taking a bus that said it went to the station, but when we got off where the driver told me to, we couldn’t see a station anywhere. I ran and asked another driver who pointed us, begrudgingly, in the right direction. Needless to say we made it with time to spare, about 2 hours in fact. So much for not getting back too late! It was an adventure, but we had a good time.

Despite Florence being packed with tourists, even when it wasn’t high season, I would recommend a visit if you are in the area, just plan out what you want to see ahead of time and try to find places away from the train station to eat. It’s hard to say off the tourist path because it seemed to me that tourists had infiltrated every little street, but there are places to be found that are not super expensive and still decent.

Friday, the last day, we headed back to Ravenna and out to the sea (Punto Marina Terme). We got some piadina’s from a little ma and pop and stand in the little park and shared a nice little picnic lunch. My dad’s dream of riding a bike in Italy finally came to fruition and he took an hour or so to explore the town and the little towns in the surrounding area while my mom and I relaxed and had some lattes.

We spent a nice day just relaxing and taking in Italy together. Dad negotiated a bike rental with a man who spoke no English, my mom and I experienced a hole in the ground toilet, which we promptly opted not to use, and we shared a drink and toasted to a wonderful week spent in Italy together. A week that, while being unforgettable and incredibly enjoyable, went by all too fast.
Saturday morning came too soon and before I knew it I was on the platform waving goodbye as their train pulled out of the station and headed back to Milan. It’s always wonderful to have visitors here, but it’s so hard to say goodbye at the end of it, especially when everyone seemed so content and at peace here. They’ll be back again.

So now I’ll get to the less exciting or at least the more nerve-wracking experience that was taking my first University of Bologna exam. Flor and I had been studying quite a bit trying to remember every little detail in the books; we had even cracked a little you might say. When exam day rolled around we were nervous, but both so tired we almost didn’t feel it at 8 a.m. as we headed to the building.

Now we’d been getting all different versions of how the exam would go. It would be the with professor or the assistants, the whole rest of the class would be in the room, only a few people would be in the room, the professor would be nice because we’re foreign, the professor would be mean because we’re foreign – basically we didn’t know what to expect, despite all the advice.
As we waited the hall started to fill up until there were about 75 people waiting to take the exam. It turned out there was more than one exam going on that day, in that room, at the same time. We were lucky enough to have our professor show up almost an hour late and then take us to a smaller room, though still with about 50 people in it. You have to love sitting in a room that echoes, with the front row of extremely well-prepared Italian students sitting only 3 feet away from you while you give your exam to a professor who answers the phone and leaves the room without warning in the middle of your exam.

In the end it turned out just fine, we each received the highest grade possible, 30/30, so we were quite satisfied. Though we did spend the rest of the day recovering…

After the exam was finally finished, Flor and I sat down and planned out our European adventure. We will be starting on June 8th and I may not be returning to Bologna after that. The list of places we will be travelling to includes: Barcelona, Madrid, Frankfurt, Berlin, London, Amsterdam, Brussels, Paris, Prague, Bratislava, Pisa, Sicily, Calabria, Sorrento, Pompeii and Naples. We are finalizing everything today (i.e. booking flights, train tickets, hostels, etc.). I’m sure there will be ups and downs, but we will definitely come back having had an incredible, once-in-a-lifetime adventure.

We recently took a short overnight trip to Trento, a small city up in the Dolomite Mountains. The train ride was beautiful, right through the heart of the mountains. Everything was green, except the snow capped mountain tops. There were small vineyards on each small patch of flat earth.

Trento itself was an extremely welcoming place, easy to navigate with lots of small-town character. The Italian could be a little hard to understand at times, given that it is so close to the Austrian border. We toured the Castello di Buonconsiglio, from which the views to the mountains were absolutely amazing. Their Piazza Duomo was pretty big for the size of the city and appeared to be a popular hangout.

We saw a very Greek looking structure on one of the hills just outside the city and decided we’d try to tackle the hill and see what the monument was all about. But on the way we got a little sidetracked by the ski-lift to another city on top of another hill. The ride was only 90 cents and the view on the way up and from the top were beautiful, absolutely beautiful.

The girl at the front-desk of the hostel had told us that it would take at least 2 hours to reach the monument on the hill, so when we got to the beginning of the path and saw that the park closed at 7 and that it was 5 we were skeptical as to whether or not we should still try to go. But we decided to give it a try. Turns out it only took 15-20 minutes, a rough 15-20 minutes but still. We felt quite accomplished at the end.
At the top the Greek-looking monument was actually a mausoleum to Cesare Battisti. We picnicked for a bit up in the park before heading back down to the hostel and into town for a little while. We sat and heard a local band play for a little while at a party for Labor Day behind Piazza Duomo. It was a great way to end the night.

The next day we headed back to Bologna around noon and so ended our trip to Trento! Next up: Siena! We go to Siena with our program on Monday morning and I am really looking forward to it. I have a feeling we will not want to leave!

A la prossima!! Ciao a tutti! Baci!