Bologna, Italy

Alright, it's actually almost end of the month right now and I'm finally catching up on my time in Italy. I guess details will be scarce given that my memory is atrocious. I guess most of these posts will be mostly pictures, apologies. I've been very lazy over the last month, both in updating but also in doing things in general. Hope you like the pictures all the same. :)

Friday, 7th September - Sunday, 9th September '12
I remember the 7th was a pain in the butt. I remember leaving Marlene's apartment very early on the Friday morning, and making it to my train with maybe 1 minute to spare. I accidentally under-estimated how much time it would take to get to the train station, then screwed up and took the U-Bahn in the wrong direction, so had to get off and then go back one stop the other way. And I ran, actually ran like crazy the entire way to the train station. I hadn't eaten and I felt faint and couldn't breath and was coughing and spluttering to get on. Yeah... exercise... who needs that stuff.

Anyway, luckily I made it to Bologna. But I arrived like 2 hours later than expected, because my first train was over an hour delayed due to some track work on the way, I missed my connection and then had to pay an extra 6 euros for the next train... and it took 30 minutes more than the train I was supposed to take. It was all just a massive pain in the butt. I splurged a bit my entire Italy trip and stayed in a nice B&B. I found that Italy, in general, didn't offer much in the way of hostels. They had much fewer hostels than the other countries I'd been too, and in general, weren't of the same standard.

Anyway, that night I went out to a place nearby my accommodation and got some tortellini in broth. The lady's at the restaurant were lovely and explained everything to me, and told me about how the bread was a special type of bread from Bologna and stuff. It was lovely.

On Saturday, I did a cooking class. I'll do a separate entry for that.

Anyway the guy was super nice and he walked around city with me and explained what was what and what life is like there. I really loved Bologna, it felt like a very unique city. The architecture seemed a lot older than I'm used to for European cities, and it had these beautiful porch walkways throughout the entire city. It wasn't a huge cosmopolis and seemed very welcoming. It didn't seem overly touristy and just felt like a sincere depiction of an Italian community. I can't quite describe it, but I really enjoyed my day there. 

 They had a lot of these towers. Apparently they were built by super rich families for when there was an invasion and they just shut themselves up in these big towers until it was all over. haha. assholes!