Bologna Baloney: My first few days...

…have been awesome! My first impressions of Bologna have been great and I think I’m definitely going to enjoy spending a year here.

Noelle (another UChicagoan in Bologna for a year) and I arrived here on Monday afternoon, exhausted from a series of delayed flights and about 24 hours of straight travelling. We didn’t want to waste any time napping though, so we took showers and immediately went to the Wind store to buy cell phones. Our phones took a whole day to begin working, so it was important that we got them as soon as we could, because we need an Italian number to search for apartments.

After that, we wandered around Bologna for about 2-3 hours, just exploring the area around our hotel and the University zone. We found the UniBo version of the Seminary Co-op (see picture below) and started looking for “annuci,” or postings about apartment rentals. At the risk of sounding totally ridiculous, the colors here are really cool. The buildings in the “centro storico” (city center) are orange and yellow, and many with red roofs and shutters. All the sidewalks are covered and made of stone or tile. Also, the graffiti artists here are especially talented—there is a very accurate representation of Dexter from Dexter’s Lab right outside the Hotel Holiday—maybe I’ll get around to photographing some of it soon.

After wandering through the winding, portico-ed streets for a while, we met with some other BCSP students for dinner. Everything I’ve heard about the food being absolutely amazing is true so far. I’m not going to go into any detail because I’ll get hungry. But, I did get two great “Stupid American in Italy” stories from dinner that first night.

1.) Hanging out at the table forever because you didn’t know that they won’t bring the check until you ask for it.

2.) Ordering way way too much wine because a.) It’s cheaper than water and b.) No one at the table understands the metric system enough to know that a liter is quite a lot.

We drank all the wine. Without any further explanation, I’ll just skip to the part where I got Nutella-flavored gelato and sat in the Piazza Maggiore with new friends. Overall, a great first night!