Last fall medium-well had the opportunity to go over to study abroad in Italy for the semester. Now unlike other students to whom "study abroad" means "go to a foreign country and drink and do drugs" (coughcough Prague coughcough), medium-well actually wanted to study. The students had a Fall break for a week during their semester during which time a lot of the students were booking flights to places all over Europe. Medium-well didn't really want to go with any of them so Mom and I decided to take a week long trip to Italy to see her. Dad had to stay home since small-one is still in school and he was going to have to take her on college visits in the spring anyway. I had already been to Italy with the church choir when I was in college, so I had a semi-grasp of what traveling in Italy was about. After a whirlwind of Mom reading every tour guide book of Italy the library had ever owned, reading a lot of blogs, me getting Italian language software and learning how to say "would you like to come back to my place" in Italian, getting permission to take leave, and packing we were finally on our way to meet medium-well in Italy!
So Mom and I hopped on a non-stop plane to the Rome airport and after getting through dinner, trying (and failing) to fall asleep as we flew through the night, and breakfast we landed in Rome. We then caught the train from the airport to the main train station in Rome (termini) and got on a regional train to castiglion fiorentino where medium-well's school was located. Not going to lie, we were so insanely exhausted that it's a good thing the German women tourists next to us on the train didn't have sticky fingers because we both were out on the 2.5 hour ride!
We get to the Castiglion train station and see medium-well on the train platform. We call out to her since she is down a little bit further, and she turns and sees us and promptly bursts into tears! We couldn't use our cell phones in Italy so we were just relying on last nights emails about which time to meet at the train station, and when medium-well didn't see us get off the train she thought she'd missed us or something and had been so looking forward to seeing us that she just got really sad but no worries, she recovered super fast. Then we took a massive hike up a lot of hills with our suitcases in unseasonably warm weather to see her place.
There she is in her room! Showing off her clothes steamer (she gets that have-to-iron-everything tendency from Mom. I didn't get that gene.) The purse hanging on the blue armoire is one she got in Florence at an outdoor market and she liked it so much she never wore it in Italy because she was so worried it would get slashed!
We went out to see the town and get some lunch, but apparently when the students get a fall break, the town decides they can get a fall break too. So all the places she wanted to take us were closed, but we found some pizza and had our first lesson in the interesting way people do things in Italy. Fact #1 eat your pizza with a fork.
Then it was back to her room to grab our stuff and race down to the train station to catch the train to Bologna where our hotel was. By the time we got to Bologna it was pitch black but it was only 7:30pm so I wasn't too worried yet. Still, walking by the train station at night was a bit dicey. We looked at the map and made it to the street we needed to be on but I swear everything looks ominous in the dark, especially around public transportation. We started walking down the street and it turned into an outdoor mall surprisingly, complete with bad pizza shops just like a food court! We passed a church and some more shops, some expresso bars closed for the night and were wondering if we would have to go walking forever until randomly mom goes "Oh I think it's here." Yep, it was a glass storefront with a red curtain covering the window, if she hadn't looked up right then who knows where we would have ended up! Anyway, we check in andf get to our room. It took us a good hour and a talk with a random person in the hallway to figure out the room lights. There aren't switches there are light panels with buttons. When you walk in the lights stay on for a minute or two then go off and you're plunged into darkness until you open the front door. Turns out you have to put you key card in the slot by the front door to get the lights to stay on. Honestly that's only half the battle because it took us a good five minutes each night to hit all the buttons in a random configuration to get them to all shut off.
Oooookay so logistics aside, it was now time to start vacationing! We placed our suitcases down and went out to find dinner with Medium-well's classmate. By now, mom and and I had been up for more than 24 hours but being that it was 8pm and people in Italy eat at 9pm or 10pm we were still early. We wandered around and found a sidewalk restaurant to eat at. Problem was it was outdoors and this is Italy. There was so much smoke! Everyone smokes in Italy and it was ridiculous. Anyway we stayed down wind for most of dinner. I got pizza for dinner and mom got pasta with bolognese sauce because . . . we were in Bologna! Medium-well got a pizza with and egg on it and a side of veggies because she was starved for vegetables. From the way she tells it all of Italy should have scurvy by now since all they seem to eat is olive oil, meat, and pasta. Then we went back to the hotel and fell into a deep sleep!
The next day we had decided that it wasn't going to be in the budget to take a tour of parma to see where parmesean cheese and balsamic vinegar were made so we made the executive decision to wander around Bologna. But first, it was Sunday so we needed to find church. Lucky for us, we knew exactly where one was.
We popped out of the hotel, turned left, and followed the glowing cross to church. Yes that is the church we passed on the way to the hotel the night before and yes that is a church in essentially a strip mall! Mass was fine, it was all in Italian and no one liked us but hey we got mass in. The best part was it was super close to the hotel . . . Let me explain, they were doing some recognition thing with the high school kids and it went on and on and I REALLY needed to use the restroom!!! Like Really REALLY needed to go and I had no idea where the bathrooms were so I walked out of church during the preparation of the gifts, walked the three minutes to our hotel, used the restroom, and walked back to finish out the last half hour of church! I mean really how random but hey it worked!
After church it was time to explore. We started with the park across from the hotel. Like I mentioned before, medium-well actually took her classes seriously. One of the things all the students had to do was take pictures of certain elements they'd see. She took pictures of ironwork, doors, and here she is taking a picture of a tree because well she is in landscape architecture! Go figure I know.
Mum and medium-well. This is one of my favorite pictures of the whole trip :)
Moi and medium-well. Again just wandering around Bologna.
We found some sandwiches for lunch (finding a place to eat that wasn't a sit-down restaurant was a big challenge this trip). But this is where Mom's love of salami was born!
After taking our lunch break we continued to tour the other half of Bolonga. Not kidding, in the morning we went left out of our hotel and in the afternoon we went right. Pretty much the thing to do in Italy is go in all the churches. Almost every church is open to the public and they are all beautiful! Here's a mural on the wall in one. I love that it's 3D! So cool! And of course I had command of the camera so I took a picture :)
Here's the rest of the interior of the church. Since all the murals on the wall were made of stone we were able to use cameras inside. I can also attest that even though it looks beautiful, the acoustics are horrendous, but hey when they were built mass was said in latin so it's not like anyone needed to understand anything anyway . . . !
Since this was more of a last minute choice to tour Bologna we kind of just wandered along and looked at outdoor stuff. Medium-well had a thing with one of her classmates where they would climb every tower they came across. Considering the tower on the left had to be dismantled to it's current height because of structural instability, mom and I vetoed the whole climbing thing. This is where some random college guys asked me to take their picture. I don't think they realized I was with my mom and sister ;)
This isn't the church we were in previously in the day, this was the main church in the square. I must admit this was the least impressive church we were in the whole time. Can you say boring facade? According to Medium-well it had to do with political wars that the facade wasn't finished back in the day, but still, eh. The only cool thing about this church was the astrological mural on the floor. It was a line that had the times of day on it and also the days of the year. Based on how the sun hit the floor through a window you could tell the time and read it like a calendar. Also it used to have murals on the walls, frescos, that had been removed by a wealthy man at one point in history. They had since been sold to museums and one is actually in a gallery in DC. We all plan on going to see it at some point.
This apparently was one of the main attractions in Bologna due to the um . . . impressive proportions of the statue . . . and since I knew my grandparents might read this post, I took a far away photo ;)
Since it was getting dark it was time for us to stop touristing and find some dinner. We found a promising place, went to the hotel to change, and walked back to this restaurant which was right around the corner. Have I mentioned that it was the most amazingly wonderful thing to be able to head back to the hotel for clean bathrooms and water? We would miss this later in the trip :/
Back to the restaurant, this one was inside and much better than the night before. I try to always have wine with dinner in Italy, so mom and I each had a glass. I got pasta this time but mom and medium-well got pizza. It's almost cliche to order pizza in Italy but it was the cheapest item on the menu and it was big and filling so hey we were cliche!
One of the regions we wanted to see in Italy was the lake region up in northern Italy. No we didn't go to lake Como where george clooney owns a villa. We were going to go to a grouping of three lakes and bike ride around them but it turns out it would have taken a lot of hours to get to one city and transfer trains to get to another city where you can rent bikes (no guarantee the bike rental place would be open on Sundays) and then somehow get to the lakes. So we went to Mantova instead and walked around the lakes they had there. It was so misty that day! But it was really nice to explore a city essentially deserted. You got all the charm of an Italian city without having to deal with actual Italians!
When we got there we found a cute little inner city garden.
We then walked to the lake, and . . . well . . . It was misty!
I thought these trees looked really cool so I made Medium-well pose while I took a picture.
All along the path around the lakes were these physics related activities for kids (and adults lol) to do. This one is showing you that it's a lot easier to lift an object if you are farther away from the fulcrum. It was like and outdoor science museum and we took full advantage being the only ones outside.
It also had rained recently so the path was muddy. Here you can see that the fog lifted a bit as we went farther on our walk. This was actually right after I made mom and Medium-well traipse over a super muddy drainage pipe/goat pathway to get to the rest of the path. We were trying to reach the end so we could get to a restaurant the tour office lady had told us about but we never saw the restaurant (and we walked for a while) and the path from here on out was essentially all puddle. So we turned around and walked on the street and sidewalk back to the dry path.
Back in Mantova proper, we were going to go look in the gardens directly behind me as I'm taking this picture, but they were closed on Sundays. We were also going to go into the church (you can see the duomo behind the tower. Btw "duomo" just means "dome" in Italian) but it was closed from 1pm-3pm and we had to catch the train at 3:30pm.
So we instead spent our time eating a delicious lunch at a well reviewed restaurant. I think all three of us can agree that this was the best meal we ate in Italy! Pumpkin is the traditional ingredient of the region. I had pumpkin ravioli, Mom had pizza with pumpkin on it, and I think Medium-well had a salad? Haha I can remember what I ate but remembering what others ate is tough. This restaurant also had the best bathrooms of the trip. They were new and quite nice, although I did end up accidentally using the mens . . .
Since the gardens were closed and so was the church, we just walked around for a bit after lunch. We came upon a statue of dante (he's there in the background) and couldn't resist the opportunity to emulate a famous Italian :)
It took all of us posing the other person to get the placement of the hands just right!
Ah Dante, such an inspiration for photographers.
Now this little church became our theme of the whole trip! We were wandering around, minding our own business when we stumbled across this little church! Or in italian: piccolo chiesa. Mom loved the fact that it was so small and dainty, and yet still so intricate. It was such a smaller scale from the grandeur of the cathedrals we'd been seeing. In every town we went on from here on out we always looked for a piccolo chiesa :)
This was the interior of the little church. So pretty with all the white marble. I'm guessing it used to be a family chapel for the large residence under construction next to it right outside. Now I wonder if anyone uses it.
This was our last look at Mantova before we got on the train and headed back to Bologna. It almost looks like Venice!
Once we got back to Bologna, we grabbed some lettuce, bread, ham, and cheese from the grocery store and had a picnic dinner in our hotel room. After dinner we made a quick trip outside to a gelateria for Mom's first gelato in Italy and our parting salvo to Bologna. We packed up and were off to Rome the next day!
Before I do the Rome post, I want to write a few things down about Bologna and our time here.
1. The hotel was strange to us at first, for example, the lights not being obvious. There was also the shower which wasn't really a shower, just a tub with a glass door and a hand-held sprayer. We found out the hard way that the glass half partition did not have a water-tight seal so we had to point the shower sprayer at the wall and only rinse off with it. Also there was only enough wifi to support one person on the internet at a time. Made it hard to research where to go the next day. But there were good things about it to. The breakfast at this hotel was the best we had. They had servers who would bring you an individual pot of hot water so you could make your tea. They had fruit and hard boiled eggs and toast and nutella (my fav breakfast) and yogurt. It wasn't extravagant but it was quite nice. It also looked nice, it had that Italian charm.
2. We became experts at the train system during our stay here. We also became aware of how expensive train rides were. Our plan, before we got to Italy, was to take the train everywhere. Well once we realized that it was 50 euro per person one way to some of these places we had to adjust our thinking. I will admit to having a mini-meltdown in the hotel because I was so sad that the prices of the tickets were preventing us from going where we wanted to go and making Mom and medium-well not have a good trip. They assured me it was all fine and we learned to roll with the punches and make the most out of everything we were able to do. Medium-well really helped us learn the ropes of the train system. Like plane tickets, the earlier you bought your tickets, the better the fares. The cheap seats would get snatched up fast. So even though we only rode the train to Mantova and back while staying in Bologna, we were looking up fares at night and at the station during the day to buy tickets for our upcoming trip to Rome. To add to the money debate, there are different classes of trains you can take. There is the typical passenger train where you can buy first or second class tickets. But there is also the high speed train. This train is pretty expensive, but we decided that instead of riding the passenger train for 5 hours + to get from Florence to Rome we would buy the high speed tickets and get there in 1 hour 45 minutes. To us, that was worth it. So figuring out which ticket to buy was a challenge, but then there was the challenge of actually purchasing the tickets. Bologna wasn't that touristy so, as Americans, we stuck out like sore thumbs. At the train stations, the gypsies would try and offer to "help" us. Medium-well warned us that this was a scam and the person helping you would actually be the distraction so someone else could come up and rob you. Thankfully we could spot the gypsies easily and buying tickets turned into a full out battle strategy! Mom and Medium-well would both be at the kiosk buying the tickets and I would stand back to back with them and stare down or yell at any gypsy who came close. But we never got pickpocketed so I guess this strategy worked!
3. People in Bologna were weird. It was a college town so there were a ton of teenagers and they were all what we would term as rebellious. They all just looked like delinquents to me! They would be rude, mostly to Medium-well and me, by crowding us off the sidewalks and such. After a while we didn't let it bother us. The people in Bologna also like to wear the biggest, most intense winter jackets . . . in 70 degree weather! Not kidding, it was so unseasonably warm while we were there but everyone else was bundled up to their necks in down puffer coats. I saw one baby in a stroller who looked so miserable! You'd think they'd be sweating profusely, but they kept at it.
4. I truly don't mean to sound to negative in these blogs posts, we did have a good time and I think all of us were really glad we went on this trip, I just don't think any of us expected it to be so much work. What we like to say, looking back, is that we took a trip not a vacation. Overall, we have memories to last a life time (most of which I'm sharing with you!) and consider ourselves extremely lucky to have been able to travel to Italy for a week. It's not something I ever dreamed I would be doing. But at the same time, I'm not going to sugar coat it, it was work and at times it was hard. So if you're planning on traveling to Europe or any other place in the world, it's going to be the chance of a life-time but it's not all sunshine and roses like you hear almost everyone tell you.
But enough of the maudlin, next time we're off to ROME!
