Paradise Bologna

Buongiorno! A quick note--there will often be more pictures in my collection than I post in this blog. So, be sure to check the photos above (they'll also be larger there)! Things have been going pretty well in Firenze although Brian has had a terrible time sleeping. The bedroom apartment is very quiet at night; so, if he can get to sleep, he stays that way. We visited our friends at GU-in-Florence, and spent quite a while catching up with Una (the librarian). The rest of the day was spent pl...

Ciao! (again, just a reminder, there are more pictures than found in this blog!) The second morning in Bologna was also beautiful although we were going to run out of luck by the end of the day. Taking advantage again of the weather, we thought we'd walk a bit more, exploring some other squares and churches. Our first stop was Piazza Santo Stefano, one of the loveliest piazzas in the city. It is home to Bologna's oldest church, or rather, church complex. The site was originally a pagan site, ...

The Bologna Trip was one of three Cultural Trips provided by IES to students in the program. The other ones are a 3-day trip to Rome in March and a 5-day trip to Sicily in April. I'm not going on the other two trips because I've already been to Rome and the Sicily one is very expensive and I'd rather spend my money on other trips (like a week traveling in Spain and Portugal!) Warning: I foresee these two entries on Bologna being long, because our guide told us a lot of really interesting thin...

Ipod - my good friend kam thindal felt I had insulted my Christian readers by calling Rome the home of Christianity (which he said is jerusalem) instead of, as he said, Catholics. It's a very good point so I wanted to apologize to my 1 Christian reader: sorry kamal (aka JC). Now we're in bologna and I already had my tagliatelle ragu (bolognese). It's good to be back in north Italy, and though we got here late this place seems to be as good as Florence if not better, depending on the attractio...

Well after a few days of being sick I'm just about recovered, still got a stuffy nose and sunny probably needs another day. We're headed to Florence today which is only an hour away and hopefully we can get a room at the same place as last time. I walked around bologna yesterday checking it out, it doesn't have any main attractions like David but it makes up for it in liveliness (I should work for their tourism board, no?). This is clearly a university town and it's full of young people every...

I crack myself up. While starting this entry, I forgot the name of our hotel in Bologna. Hotel Paradise! How could I forget being in paradise?? oy. Anyways, so Bologna was cool. Less touristy than Venice as you can imagine and had the chance to meet some local guys while sipping a beer outside a little mini mart on a side street. We managed to walk around the main two piazzas, the shopping district, and the university (it is a university town with much more nightlife). We all managed to find ...

Florence to Bologna, Monday May 15th To start, I was able to get Bank of America off their ass and fix my credit card problem. I had called Tony the previous night and got some banking information and a new telephone number to call them. Apparently the woman that said she would block my card at the bank never did it. I was able to take out euros last night so I could pay my hotel bill in cash. If I hadn't then it would have been an additional 80 euros! And at 1.30 to the euro... Today woke up...