The Rocky Beaches of Liguria

As you may have discerned thus far in my blog posts, I can be quite loquacious at times (a VERY cool word I learned for the GRE and finally get to use!). Since I do not have a lot of time to write tonight and I begin classes tomorrow, I will try to relate as best I can a trip I took this weekend that I think epitomizes all that I hoped for and dreamed of experiencing when I came to Italy. Highlights from the rest of the week include more confusion about coursework, buying new running shoes, and making gnocchi in the tiny kitchen of my tiny apartment. Moving on...

I stayed up until after 2 on Friday night hanging out with an Erasmus student and two of her friends from Germany. I went home early when they headed to a nightclub ('kinky'), took a cold shower, and went to sleep. Yesterday morning I woke up at 6:15 AM and struggled into the kitchen, somehow threw together our tiny coffee maker, and made another early morning bike ride through 'il centro' to the train station. When I arrived at the station, I bought my incredibly cheap ticket to Sarzana (only 13 euro to go across the country! Incredibile!) and rode the train for three hours, stopping for a breather in Fidenza, before arriving in Sarzana. I was planning to read more of a book on Dante on the train, which is all in Italian and which I am supposed to have done by tomorrow, but it was difficult because the second half of the trip the train began travelling through the beautiful northern Appenine mountains (Alpa Apuane or something) and the train would go over these enormous bridges with amazing views of hillsides dotted with tiny stucco houses. With red roofs. Like a tourist I was glued to the window the whole time, and I am amazed that people were able to build such an amazing thing as this railroad.

The railroad tried to follow a river as best as it could, and this river was sooo big and beautiful. Bridges for the train would go over the river for long periods of time. Since we are just entering the rainy season in Italy, the river was incredibly low, but I could tell that it had enormous floods because there were huge cobbles and boulders in the middle of the river which could only be picked up by tons of water. Playing in that river would be real fun, but I'm sure it is polluted by all the Italian style factories dotting its banks.

After arriving in Sarzana I thought about waiting for my friend Clemente, who I met on couchsurfing.com, to come get me, but instead I decided to explore his hometown for a while before calling him. I did what I usually do and just started walking, and unlike my trip to Modena this time my strategy actually worked pretty well. There was an amazing statue that kind of looked like an oscar award in the piazza maggiore. I took a left and walked down a street where all kinds of vendors, from antiques to candy to cheese to clothes, had set up booths outside their stores to enjoy the day.

The start of the annual parade for Napolean. All of the
men marched past chanting old war songs.

Finally I arrived in another piazza where the biannual Manifestazione di Napoleone was taking place, although I did not know it at the time. I just thought it was cool because men of all ages were arranged in groups dressed in different uniforms, chanting songs that I guess the army of Napoleon had chanted when they were headed to battle. There was also a cannon, which was cool. When the parade began I watched it go by and then followed it, being sure to dodge the horse poop. A guy playing Napolean led the parade, which was quite short and ended in the castle on the other side of town. This castle was composed of round towers that were wide at the top with crumbling stone walls stretching between them. I sat on the wall of one of these towers and ate some grapes and a tomato while I looked at the view. Hillsides dotted with tiny houses and a few villas. Another castle rested on the hill closest to town.



A group of soldiers I met in the couryard of the
castle. The guys with the beard was very cool.

I ate slow, and after I finished I walked back down into the courtyard of the castle where one of the older 'soldiers' was teaching another one how to properly hold and heft the gun. After they finished I asked him to teach me, so I learned how to hold a really old rifle, how it worked, and how to load it. Back in the day, soldiers had to put in a little gunpowder to fire the gun, pull the trigger back, pour powder down the barrel, put in the ball, stuff it down with a rod, FIRE, and then do it all over again. Bad-A soldiers could do this four times a minute. Afterwards I got some snapshots of the soldiers and headed back to the train station to meet Clemente. On the way I ran into Jessica, an actress from Berlin who had already been touring Liguria for a month and who was also couch surfing, and we ate a baguette with Nutella I had brought from Bologna under a fountain while we watched kids play at being soldiers.

We linked up with Clemente at the station and headed to his house which was very close by. The bedrooms and kitchen of the house were beautiful, but Clemente's mom didn't really approve of having foreigners in the house (imagine that) and they had an argument of which I understood most of it. Finally I left some stuff from my backpack in his bedroom and the three of us took off for a rocky pocket beach.

To get to this beach we first walked to the bus station. Walking with Clemente was crazy because he seemed to be oblivious to everything whenever he was crossing the street and motioning with his hands all the time. Clemente is 26 and he is just finishing some sort of essay to get his degree from a university in Torino. He has amazing dredlocks that he wears in a million different ways, and he talks fluent Italian, English, and Spanish. He has lived in Sarzana most his life, but next Thursday he is heading to Lithuania to do something similar to the Peace Corps for Italy. He wore very cool colorful patchwork pants.

A view from the bus on the way to Montemarcello.
The road clung to the side of the mountain and
the valley spread out below.

We boarded a tiny bus and headed toward the beach. All of the roads were tiny, and at one point the bus had to back up an entire street to let another bus pass by. We began to head up a hill, and before every turn the bus driver hit the horn and the bus made an incredibly funny sound. As we climbed up the view kept getting better and better, and I could see all the way over this gorgeous valley to the mountains on the other side. At first I thought there was still snow on the side of the mountain, but Jessica told me that this was where the famous marble that all the statues and real nice tables are made of is mined. I really would like to go back and see this place where tons of caves are carved into the side of the mountain.

When we got to the top of the mountain I kept falling behind because I just kept looking as we walked through the tiny, incredibly Italian town of Montemarcello. No cars were in the town, and there were stone walkways with sheets and clothes flapping in the breeze overhead and plants on windowsills where women were talking to friends on the street from the window and a little deserted piazza named after a famous king and tons of statues large and small placed randomly around the town and pieces missing from the sides of buildings and crumbling rock everywhere and an amazing view of the sea and the islands in the sea and the cliffs leading down to the water.

A picture from the steep trail of islands in
the Ligurian Sea.

A small, stepped, steep trail led down to the water where Jessica and I arrived first at a tiny pocket beach while Clemente talked with his friend back on the trail. On the beach were about thiry people, all Italians, sunbathing or swimming or talking and gesticulating madly or sleeping or walking the short way from one side of the beach to the other. The sand on the beach was closer to tiny gravel, and it felt amazing on my feet. I undressed right on the beach and stepped into the running shorts I brought, then walked down the beach into the water, fell backwards into the water, and floated for what felt like forever. I swam around a buoy out from the shore very slowly, wishing that I had brought goggles so that I could see through the crystal clear water. Back at shore I crawled onto shore where I sat and let the waves crash on my feet and picked up the incredibly smooth stones to reassure myself that I was here.

Clemonte and Jessica chillaxing. Notice Clemente's
sexy bathing suit...

I stretched out on my sleeping mat for a while and then went with the other two to jump off a rock on one side of the beach. We climbed over some little rocks, up onto the big ones, and waited while Clemente prepared for a long time to dive, stretching his hands into the air, and finally just jumped in. I followed, and afterwards Clemente, who rock climbed until he turned 20, climbed up the rock. I tried and slipped back into the water, tried and slipped, but couldn't stop laughing. I went back up the other side, waited while Clementer prepared to dive, moved him out of the way and did a swan dive into the water which was scary because there were a few big rocks down there. This is about as close to paradise as it gets.

Jessica, Clemente, and I hung out on the beach while several bus-boats came and went to take people back to town. I ate more bread with Nutella and Jessica told me about the play that she is currently working in Berlin, which is for teenagers to teach them about Fascism. As the sun began to set (in Italian, tramontane), we struggled back up the trail and I stopped many times to wait for Clemente and to look at the painted sky. On the other edge of the small town we sat on stone chairs in the grass outside a bar, with birds chirping in a cage on the other side of the patio, and waited for Clemonte's friend to pick us up. He did, and then he drove (crazily, insanely, like all Italians), we picked up food, then went to Clemente's house to get ready for the night.

Sunset on the beach after most of the people had
left on the boat. The boats had stairs attached to
the front for people to board.

Clemente and I made Jessica and Lorenzo wait at the car while we pondered the meaning of the Poker Face song. If anyone out there knows what is meant by 'Carry my poker face,' please let me know. My theory is that Lady Gaga carries a poker face when she does not want guys to know whether she likes them or not so that they like her more. Beats me.

When we headed out it was dark, and riding in the back seat of a car with the windows a little bit down on these narrow roads was an amazing feeling. After some confusion and driving around in the countryside, and after Clemente tried to hand me the white wine and spilled it in the backseat, and after picking up a friend on the side of a country road, we arrived at a birthday party taking place under a tent beside a vineyard.

I ate tons of food I had never tried. Many people told me the names for the dishes but all of them have left me. Now I only know that they were incredibly delicious, and that there were five desserts all of which I tried twice. I met many Italians at the start of the party, and I was still the American in the group from North Carolina (which, by the way, is in the middle of the east coast of the United States), but last night I felt okay about it. I had a long talk about psychology with an older Italian man while he smoked and I looked at the stars. I had a few glasses of wine and listened to my new friends play music on instruments. One guy was really jamming on the alto sax, and we exchanged numbers because he comes to Bologna almost every weekend to listen to jazz and next time I will go with him to a concert. By the end of the night I was exhausted from talking so much Italian, but the night kept going and going and going. The girl whose birthday it was had red hair and was very patient with me trying to wish her happy birthday and find out about her in my atrocious Italian. A teenager who had been jamming on guitar got a little too drunk and while he was rolling around on a stone bench one of my new friends took off his shoe and threw it perfectly onto a far away table of the tent. There were lights on the hillsides in the distance from the tiny towns that dot each one, and we were surrounded by vineyards.

After the party, we headed back to Simone's place to hang out. I ended up sleeping in his house and using the new-to-me shower in his bathroom. The shower is right next to the sink, and there is no curtain. After taking a shower the showerer has to wipe a towel at the end of a stick across the floor to get it to dry. The bathroom is tiny.

View from the window of the kitchen at the
apartment where I spent the night.

His apartment had a beautiful balcony facing out on the street where I hung my swimsuit for the night, and we all slouched down on chairs, sofas, and the floor, drank wine, and I did my best to answer questions about Obama, George Bush, obesity in America, etc. The living room had so much character: it was filled with books where all the pages were cut, there were jars and random pieces of art on the bookshelves, the short table in the middle of the room spoke of many other nights doing this same thing. I did not go to sleep until 4, but I did get to sleep in a bed surrounded by the medieval weaponry that is part of Simone's hobby.

This morning I woke up at 9, went up to the kitchen to do the dishes, read the book about Dante until I got a headache, then went back downstairs to write amid the medieval weaponry. I read Dante next to a window which opened out on the town, and there was a great view of a medival castle on the hill on the distance but a crane was partially obstructing the view. The kitchen was so beautiful with its amazing array of tools for cooking and the lived-in look that told me that Simone and his girlfriend and friends often eat together and that they are not concerned about the things in the kitchen but the people at the table.

When Simone and his girlfriend woke up (their bed is under a dream-like mosquito net), I walked to a nearby bar with him to buy milk and our breakfast was a bowl of milk with a small cup of coffee poured in it. Into this mixture they tossed cookies, which float on top of the mild and which are removed for eating with a spoon. Delicious, absolutely delicious.

The girlfriend had to leave to go back to her university, which was six hours away by train, and they could not give me a ride to the train station because they have one of those three wheeled thingamajigs that just chugs along, so I took the walk in the bright sunlight to the nearby major road and caught a bus with some help from a nice woman back to Sarzana. I rushed to the trainstation and bought a ticket home for 11 euro, then went to say good-bye to Clemente. He advised me to start climbing on the indoor wall in Bologna, which I will heavily consider, then advised me to go to a certain cafe right across from the church, Gemmi, before leaving and try a certain dish. I walked there, past the vendors outside their shops, bought one of whatver it was and sat down on a table outside the cafe, ate the delicious dessert very slowly, and stared happily into space. I bought a loaf of very good, heavy bread on the way back to the train and made the four hour ride back to Bologna in a crowded train.

This country is so amazing. I start school tomorrow but I'm actually pretty excited because I'm really interested in my courses. I'm taking a Biodiversity and Evolution class, a course where I will read Dante's Divina Commedia in Italian, and a course on the history of art criticism. I'm so excited. Every day here has been like vacation, and I have the feeling that it will stay that way. I have Fridays off, so I will definitely be taking off on Thursdays to do some biking. I have never, every felt anything so amazing as the sand on that beach. Walking over it was like having my feet massaged by the earth. When I dove in the water, I broke out of the surface like a whale, and let the waves move me around while I took deep breathes and looked into the sky. This is living.

So, several computers are conspiring together to prevent me from posting photos of Venice and Bologna on the web. I will post these photos later this week, so stay tuned! Comenciamo:

Last Wednesday was a confusing day for me. I woke up excited because I had decided to attend my first lecture that would be entirely in Italian, and I felt that I was beginning to pick words apart and understand what people were saying. However, not everything goes as planned, and sometimes nothing goes as planned.

After breakfast I helped Giulio start to clean out the cantina. This little room that makes up our basement is a mess, and we made a start on trying to fix some of the broken bikes so that they might at least be ridden. I learned a lot about where the tools are and what we will need to buy to really fix the bicycles and make them usable. For lunch I went to the bread shop (in Italian panetteria or something like that) to get my daily loaf of amazing bread, ate a large lunch,

slurped down my café, and headed off to find out where this lecture was.

Then the problems started. The lecture was on the age old debate of creation vs. evolution, Darwin vs. Christianity, and sounded fascinating, but I had to find where it was first. I rode on my crappy bike over to Piazza XX Settembre, parked it, and walked around the piazza three times trying to find the address and asking for directions. Finally I decided to give up and at least see the arch that sits in the middle of the piazza and discovered that the talk was taking place inside the arch! It was being hosted by a group called Legambiente, an Italian environmental group, and since I have an interest in getting involved with volunteering I figured this would be a good way to meet like minded people. I buzzed my way into the crumbling brick arch and walked up some stairs.

First of all I was very late, and I could feel peoples’ eyes on me as I entered the small room in which were seated only a handful of people in the audience and three people up front. An Italian professor that I had read about on the pamphlet was giving an exuberant powerpoint presentation up front, and I sat back to watch and do my best to comprehend. Many of his slides had text, so it was easier for me to follow along, but when he was just talking I caught nothing. After he finished, a man and a woman joined him at the front table and they began to critique each other’s viewpoints and to take questions from the audience.

They talked so fast that I understood none of it. I maybe caught every fourth word, but getting the overall picture about what they were speaking about was useless. What really killed me was that if the lecture had been in English, I would have been very interested in the subject and probably had questions for the presenters and opinions to discuss with them afterwards. But I guess I was over my head. While it seems as if I’ve got a pretty long history of practicing Italian, I still could not get the gist of a basic lecture. It hurt.

After the lecture I wanted to go talk to the woman who was presenting since she was the founder of some important portion of Legambiente, but I just felt exiled. They had food set up, but I didn’t feel hungry at all, and after puttering around in the back of the room and picking up some free pamphlets and paper, I left.

That night there was a party for exchange students at the PRINCE. I went, saw some familiar faces, met a very cool guy named Giovanni, drank a couple drinks, and danced with my friends. But as the evening began to wear on I felt worse and worse, not sick but just felt bad. Finally I shook a few hands, told people I didn’t feel well, and biked back to my apartment over Bologna’s cobbled streets in the light rain at midnight.

I feel like I could have been very good friends with all the people at the lecture if I spoke Italian or if they could not set me apart from other Italians. But there is this language and cultural barrier that makes me the American in every group, and I am going to have to learn how to deal with it if I am going to stay in this country. At times it seems as if none of the other exchange students care that they stand out in this city, that it is okay to just be on vacation here as students. But for me that is not enough. I don’t want to party all the time, to take advantage of all the specials and trips going on for Erasmus and other exchange students. I don’t think it is a bad thing for other people or bad to party or hang out once in a while, but I hate the idea that students from other countries come here just to party. When I meet other Italians, they see that in me and immediately all these preconceived notions pop into their heads (or I feel like they do) that I am just here to see their country and drink their wine with no concern for who they are and their history. It’s just not true.

On the upside, the following day I met with another professor in the biology department who was very helpful in helping me to decide what courses to take. I have not met one professor here who did not seem of the highest caliber. Every one of them has this assertive, type A, get stuff done personality that I totally respect. After our meeting I looked around the museum on the second floor of the Biology building, where there are a ton of taxidermy animals and frogs, salamanders, and other slippery slimy things preserved in formaldehyde. I love museums like that where I can just look and think about the difference between a toad and a frog, try to guess where they are from, see a recreation of one fish eating another. All of the objects sat on old dusty shelves, and I could tell that like the artwork under the porticoes most students and professors seem to walk by without noticing. Guess I will have to be pigeon-headed (looking from side to side all the time) for a bit longer if I want to see these sights.

In the afternoon I went to talk to another professor about a course called Biodiversita ed Evoluzione. Her office was right beside the beautiful botanical gardens for the university, and I took a walk through after discovering that she was not in at the moment. There is a beautiful fountain at the front of the museum overgrown with greenery, and there is an exhibit on all the different vegetation types found in Italy from the coast to the peaks of the Alps. Beautiful. Afterwards I read about Lineaus, the guy who started the whole taxonomy family tree species deal, in Italian, and then went to visit the professor, who was also very understanding.
That day I also went to buy my 10 euro ticket at Factory Café for Friday’s trip through the canals of Bologna. By canals, I thought they meant illuminated underground waterways that we would ride through in a Gondola and get out at the opposite end of the city! An underground river where there were ancient buildings and artifacts along the banks! I was super excited!
Like many other plans, however, the journey through the canals ended up being much more like a guided tour. We started off, like a gang of tourists, walking a long way to the cistern built by the Romans or something which used to feed water to the Fontana di Nettuno which sits in Piazza Maggiore. We walked down some dimly lit stairs through some ancient looking tunnels and emerged in a large room where we patiently listened to our incredibly clear Italian guide talk and swatted at mosquitoes. Afterwards we got the opportunity to explore the tunnels, and I really wish I had brought a flashlight because I would totally have gone down the ones with no light and it would have been awesome! There were some pretty cool faded mosaics on the wall, and I must say that the tunnels were kind of creepy and exhilarating.

After ascending back to the light and waiting for another twenty minutes, we proceeded to walk back down the hill toward the center where, at a piazza whose name I have forgotten, we listened to our tour guide some more and then went into a sewer that runs under the city.
What I had thought would be a canal was really more of a sewer with a little trickle of a stream running through it. The tunnel seemed to go on forever, and it was very dank and smelled a little bad but not awful. This was where all the water goes when rain falls on the red roofs of this city. When we were down there, the water was very low, but I’m sure that when it rains the sewer goes ballistic, filling up with the torrential downpour. I would love to see how high the water gets in a heavy downpour because all of the city center is impervious surface and all the water would go through this enormous passage way. One cool observation I made (for all my friends in the Doyle Rivers group) was that the steps at different elevations from the trickle I observed had different amounts of moisture on them. The higher a step was above the river, the drier it was, and it would be cool to use the moisture to determine how often the steps were flooded.
As I walked through the tunnel with a friend I had met during the long tour walk, our guide would stop to tell us about irregularities popping out of the side or top of the tunnel. One was the bottom of a person’s basement! Picture that during a huge flood! Back in the day, the part we walked through used to be a dump for many of the different businesses in Bologna, and all the trash went through this part of town and really stank it up. If anyone washed their dishes with the water in this ‘canal,’ the dish would come out dirtier than it had been to start with. Along the tunnel we saw several street signs posted showing which street the tunnel ran under, and I am going to try to get shots from the surface for comparison.

The tour ended, and I headed back to Factory Café with the other students to eat the buffet and drink some brewskis for a couple of hours before heading home.

Saturday I decided to make a trip to Venice. A friend I have made from Portugal met up with me near the Piazza Verdi to get a cappuchino and to get on the internet for some hostel searching. When we began, we could not find a place to stay for less than 25 euro and so we decided to check out one hostel when we got there to see what the price was and the conditions were like. The next morning I woke up at 6:15 AM, had an amazing breakfast, threw a ton of food in my backpack, and started out the door. It was raining, at 7AM in the morning, and I was too tired to figure out how to open my umbrella so I ended up getting wet again. I arrived at the train station, helped my friend buy a ticket, and we hopped on the train.

The trip started off weird. At the train station, my friend wanted to take a picture smiling and holding our tickets up. This was a very touristy action which did not bode well with me. The train ride was very nice. The man we sat across from gave me some good advice for finding a bicycle in Bologna, and I looked up the towns that we passed by in my guidebook. Out the window, we could see hills with cliffs etched into the side, and I made note of several towns where I saw bikers. I gave my friend the nice window seat so he could get a good view as we rolled into Venezia, and I could see the jewel of Italy across the water and gondolas going around in the water and it was amazing. We got off of the train and I had to go to the bathroom, but upon seeing the line and discovering that the bathroom cost 1.50 euro, I took a picture and decided to hold. Paying to go to the bathroom is not something I will ever do, EVER! However, this little introduction to Venezia was awfully telling because everything on the island is so expensive and a person has to pay even to sit down. We stepped out of the train station and I got my first view of the Grande Canale. I stood there for quite a while, amazed, and did not even hear my friend the first few times he asked me to take a picture, to take a picture of both of us, etc. I was like, no, I’m looking, and maybe I’ll snap a few on the way back for my friends back home, but no I’m just going to look right now. We walked up on the bridge near the station, and immediately he wanted another picture. I was like, no, I’m looking at the canal, sorry.

I cried. It sucked, but I knew it was coming. After all that effort spent and after dreaming about this city since I came to college, I was finally here. Right beside the bridge there was a beautiful building with sculptures hundreds of years old, and it was just so darn beautiful. I felt like I could walk forever in those streets.

Our first objective was to check out the hostel and see if it was sea-worthy. We followed our map and walked into what I guess was the rough part of Venezia, although even the rough part was pretty nice. We turned down an alley and went into the Sawadee hostel (if you are ever in Venezia, USE this hostel, 20 euro a night with breakfast buffet can’t be beat). In the kitchen, two men from Thailand were cleaning up after lunch and one of them showed me the room, which was just four beds in a room made for sleeping and not much else. There weren’t any students around at the time, and my friend got sketched out and waited outside while I chatted it up with the two Thai guys. I decided right there I was going to stay the night, and when I stepped outside my friend told me that he was definitely going back on the train. I thought about the worst that could happen, decided to accept it, and moved on. As we were walking back toward that first bridge, my friend told me he wanted to have pranzo. I told him okay, sure, we can eat what I brought when we get to the Piazza San Marco, but he wanted lasagna, Venetian lasagna. I have never heard of that, and I had already decided to only spend money on sweets or museums, so I said okay go eat your lasagna and call me when you are done.

Basically, I could complain more, but that is not what this blog is for so I will try to cut that out. Safe to say I’m thinking about travelling by myself a lot more or being more careful to choose my travel partners. Henceforth, Venezia.

Walking through the streets of the floating city was amazing. There is so much color, so many vendors selling so many products. T-shirts, masks, postcards, glass art, glass vases, glass necklaces or paperholders, FOOD of all kinds and shapes and sizes and consistencies, jewelry, sculptures, modern looking furniture. And all of the shops are looked over by beautiful apartments with sheets and plants on the balconies and stucco walls etched with decadence. There are bridges over the canals everywhere and often I would turn a corner and there would be another building hundreds of years old and dotted with amazing statues, like the whole building was a piece of art. Aromas from the restaurants drift out and people are hustling and bustling through the streets, but there are no cars or bicycles like there are in Bologna.
I walked to the Piazza San Marco, an enormous plaza where hundreds of people were gathered hanging out, eating, taking photos, or feeding pigeons. On the other side of the plaza I could see the Adriatic Sea, and I just stood there looking at the Palazzo Ducale, the Museo Correr, and the Basilica di San Marco and was just thrilled to finally be looking at building covered with art, held up by porticoes or columns shaped into statues.

I started with the Palazzo Ducale, and spent four hours looking at the enormous rooms with frescoes depicting the doges of Venice, events from the bible, and different gods from Greek mythology. Interestingly enough, sculptures of Neptune and Mars or giant paintings depicting other mythological gods would be placed right beside scenes from the bible, like the Virgin and Child or depictions of what heaven might be like or what have you. How can these two belief systems, which to me seem so different, coexist in this way? On the one hand, there are statues depicting incredibly buff and good looking deities, and on the other hand there are paintings with friars and priests pointing a finger up and indicating to the onlooker that what matters is not here on earth but above. I’m not sure how this all got tangled up in the minds of 17 and 18th century politicians and aristocrats, but maybe I will learn in the course of my studies.
And there was soooo much art. I looked, and looked, and looked, walking through the different salas that served as the meeting place for magistrature and rooms the doge used for planning. One room was filled wall to wall (and it was a BIG room) with maps drawn hundreds of years ago depicting the Mediterranean where the doge used to make plans for attacking and empire expansion. Two enormous globes sat in the middle of the room: one depicted the different continents and the other showed the stars of the night sky with pictures of the different constellations. Each globe had so many little drawing etched in that I could only guess at the meaning of each of them. Portraits of the different doges towered over me bearing manuscripts in Latin telling of their lives and accomplishments.

On the ceiling of every room there were frescoes arranged in amazing ways and bordered by gold embroidery. I was not allowed to take any pictures in the museums, but I will try to set the websites at the end so my readers will know what I was looking at.

The highlight of the Palazzo Ducale was the painting Paradiso by Tintoretto in the Sala del Magior Consiglio. It is enormous, something like 20x60 meters, and fills one end of an enormous room. During the Renaissance there was a fire in the palace and the old Paradiso was partly destroyed, so there was a competition by the greatest artists of the day to get the commission to paint it in a new day and age. That is another interesting fact about the palace: many of the paintings and sculptures and portions of the building are from different time periods, so it is not like the whole place could be attributed to a specific era in Italian history. Leading up to this painting were hundreds of others that just kind of flew by like the countryside out of the train window. Next to the courtyard of the palace stood a small building on which were placed twenty or thirty statues with a backdrop of porticoes. All of it was bathed in sunlight.

I left the museum at about 16:00 (4PM) and met up with my friend for a cappuchino. After he finished calling his mom, I walked him back to the train station and, with all the distractions that exist on the streets and after a long breather at the Ponte Rialto, and after sitting across a canal from a restaurant with piano music drifting across the water, I said good by to him, listed to the music for a while longer, then proceeded to the hostel. At the hostel I met three Germans who were on a budget vacation in Venezia (they got flights from Germany on RyanAir.com for 1 euro! 1 euro!), and I ate some more bread with butter, salami, tomatoes, and parmagianno reggiano while they cleaned up and went back to bed (long night in Padua). I went for a walk along the well light streets, ate a gelato, came back exhausted, wrote, and went to bed. That night, I forgot to close the window so a heap of mosquitoes got in and kept me up all night, but otherwise the hostel would have been amazing. In the morning, I arose early because of the mosquitoes buzzing in my ears and made myself breakfast in proper fashion: lit the oven using gas and a lighter, made coffee with these tiny coffee pots where the water evaporates up through the grounds, poured myself a heaping bowl of cereal with sugar, had toast with three different kinds of jam, and left the apartment feeling amazing.

I decided to first go to church Santi Giovanni e Paola, where there was just too much wall space and not enough dead doges to fill up the enormous nave. Many dead doges rest there in stone coffins over which are carved sculptures of the dead doges. Seems like if it was me I would want some awesome scene of me on a horse up on its hind legs leading the Venetian navy, but alas. All the paintings here were biblical, and candles and the sun filled the cathedral with light. I took my time with everything and, just as I bought a postcard and left, a group of loud tourists, the first of the day, entered the enormous church.

A ticket I had bought at the Palazzo Ducale the day before was still good for another museum, so I headed back across the Piazza San Marco to the Museo Correr to take the tour of Venetian art through time and to learn about the Venetian navy, currency, trade, weapons, the list goes on. I took too much time with the first half of the museum and did not realize that there were other floors, one of which hosted an amazing exhbit on the architect Palladio who designed many of Venice’s most important buildings ( Ca’ d’Oro, San Giorgio Maggiore, Villa Barbaro, the names are almost as pretty as the buildings), but that is the way it goes. I had a café in the museum’s café, took the long way back to the station pausing on the Ponte Rialto (Rialto bridge), ran to catch a train, and stared out the window contemplating life on the way back.

Monday night I had an amazing two hour dinner with Sara and her mom, and last night I had an amazing two hour dinner with six foreign girls I met while waiting in line to apply for an exchange student card. Tomorrow I am making dinner for a TON of people, most likely more than can fit in my apartment, and I am going to cook gnocchi. Today I woke up with high expectations and proceeded to accidently flood the bathroom after improperly using the lavatrice (clothes washer) because there is a gray tube that must always be put in the toilet or things go haywire. After waiting for a while, I met with another patient and nice professor today who is in charge of the department Le Scienze Naturali at the Universita di Bologna, and she told me I should look into a class that explores caves. And the internet does not work at my house, so I have to go to an internet point near campus and pay one euro an hour to check my email. This life is full of ups and downs. A French saying that me and a certain friend, who tends to say it differently and in the correct fashion, use all the time comes to mind:

C’est la vie.

Modena and me still looking for a bike

This is called an Askos. I saw in the the Museo Civico Archaeologico here in Bologna. It was a terracotta container designed for pouring, and the name comes from some Greek word.

This is a vase which used to hold (or still holds) the ashes of a dead Etruscan person. The pictures on the vase are of the person and possibly their family at a potentially critical moment in life. People were buried with their belongings: not just valuables but also everyday items such as fibule for pinning up robes or le tazze, cups used for drinking. These nice vases were put inside of much larger ceramic vases called ossuario.



A recreation of the statue of Neptune found in Piazza Maggiore in Bologna. The making of this sculpture went something like this: 'So, do you think you could put a few more muscles here? I'm not sure those muscles actally exist! Just keep adding muscles until he looks buffer than any of us, then Neptune will be appeased!'


Inner courtyard of the Museo Civico d'Arte in Modena. There is one really big headstone and a lot of medium size and smaller ones.

So first off I would like to let you all know my address and other information about how I can be reached. Feel free to send postcards, chocolate, money, and any non-perishable food in your house which you may have bought in bulk for a nuclear storm which did not occur.

My address:

Benjamin Bogardus c/o Monaldi
Via Vizzani 45/2
Bologna, BO 40138

My phone number here (the first number is the country code, and for many cards you may have to press #, which my Australian friend calls the hash sign, after dialing):

(39) 327-9927134

My email address for the University of Bologna:

benjamin.bogardus@studio.unibo.it

Allright I think that pretty much does it. If you have any questions about how to contact me or which presents I would like or how much money is enough to send just let me know. Oh, and also if you want to talk to me and find out how I'm doing. That is OKAY, but the others are better.

SO, I spent the weekend in a little bit of a hiatus. I've been feeling the culture shock and missing home a bit, but I have been told by enough people that this would happen that by now I'm pretty numb to it. I didn't go out for TWO NIGHTS STRAIGHT! This was find with me because I needed sleep and there was a bunch of academic stuff I had to look at online.

I woke up on Saturday with the intention of making headway towards finding a bicycle. However, the more I look the further behind I seem to fall. I am going to use one very crappy bicycle to commute to campus and buy another for touring the country. I am still riding the red bike spoken of in the last post, and we have 6 other bikes which I thought would be potential candidates for an upgrade. After eating breakfast, drinking my cafe, and watching the morning news with incomprehension, I spent an hour or two in the cantina where the bikes are stored looking around and trying to decide what to do.

The cantina is a dungeon-esque storage room in the basement below my apartment building. Lines of wooden doors along dimly lit corridors with concrete floors and lights which turn off every two minutes... you get the idea. But I've gotten used to being alone down there even though every once in a while I get shivers. Five of the bikes down there are straight trashed. Many have breaks which don't work, are incredibly rusted, have problems shifting, and NONE seem to have air in their tires. I wheeled all of them out into the hallway and spent a long time attempting to use our small pump, which I call a pompina (not a real word), to get them up to speed. After failing at this, I did my best to get all the tools in the cantina together and figure out if I needed to buy any at the store. Old bed frames, tools for spicing up mopeds, and clippings of news events from long ago are among the other detritus located in this room. Finally I returned to the light, gave one last try on fixing the low seat on my current bike, and headed back upstairs to eat.

And boy do I eat. I often feel like I eat more than all my other housemates. Many times the meals are very simple and just combinations of the same ingredients: GOOD bread, butter, salami, pasta, fresh tomatoes, and cheese. The kind of cheese I have been eating is called Grana Padana or something. It is a type of parmesan cheese which is supposed to be inferior to the more expensive Parmagiano Reggiano, but it melts in my mouth. Any of the foods in our refrigerator I could eat on their own, but combined they become organic (not an Italian word). Last night I fried some yellow pepper, onion, and garlic in olive oil with salt, pepper, and oregano, then heated a tortilla on a flat pan and shredded the low Grana Padana onto the tortilla. I cutted up these amazing little grape tomatoes while the rest cooked and then threw all this stuff together in the tortilla with some salami. It tasted heavenly, and I wasn't even that hungry because I was still full from lunch!

On Sunday I woke up and went running through the park near my house and through the Giardina Margherita, taking a different way back. The sidewalk was studded with pedestrians and church goers, and dodging them all ended up being very fun. Thankfully the Giardina Margherita has a trail around it so that I didn't have to run on concrete or pavement all the time, and I ran the trail real fast but then slowed down to a crawl at the end so that I could look at the booths for the children's festival that was going on. Lots of the little kids were doing this miniature car race and they all looked goofy. The bells in a church tower rang right over my head on the way back, and I stretched on our balcony and took a cold shower.

I decided to travel to Modena on Sunday. Modena is east of Bologna, and I had no problems this time finding the right train to take. All of the train stations in Italy operate on the same terms, so maybe I'll be less confused in the future. On the bus I studied the futuro tense in my text book and looked out the window at the flat agricultural landscape. In Modena I spent a long time walking around trying to find the duomo. I figured that a good strategy for finding museums would be to look for large building sticking out of the landscape and head toward those, but this strategy does not seem to work as well as a map. After a couple of hours I finally found a nice art museum that had a map and spent a long time looking at grave stones and about ten million paintings of the virgin and the child.

The grave stones (le stelle) came in different sizes and shapes, and each had an ingraving of the person it was made for, their father, what they accomplished in their lives, and all of this in Latin, yet another language I don't understand. I was the only one in this part of the museum, and after walking through a pair of glass doors I bought a ticket, picked up a lot of free paper, and went up to the Civic Art Museum in a glass elevator. The light coming through the glass in the top of the atrium was beautiful.

In the art museum there were a hundred thousand pictures of the virgin Mary holding the baby Jesus. There were pictures where the baby Jesus looked almost like a miniature grown up and others where he was looking like a normal baby playing with the folds of Mary's robe. Some paintings had the mother and the baby looking straight at me and in others they were looking at each other or at other members in the paintings. Chilling crosses dwelled in the backgrounds of some paintings, and in others the baby Jesus was being adored by Magi (still don't know what exactly those dudes do) or handing a key to an adult or baptizing someone. Very interesting, but my legs got super tired.

I spent too much time on the first fourth of the exhibit and had to speed through the second half, but there were many pieces that stood out to me. Many little pictures intended for alters had been designed so they could be folded up like a book with doors, and in the third room of the art museum there was an enormous piece which had several panes divided by golden plated embridery. In each was a different person (Jesas at the top peak), and it was strange to think about the panes as little rooms that each person was in. I could not take pictures in the museum, but I would have taken a picture of this one, each holy person residing in their own place in this alter piece.

Another piece that stood out to me was some naked dude sitting down with one leg propped on the other attempting to remove a splinter from his foot. There was also a wooden cello with designs etched into the wood, and at the end giant enormous paintings of events from the bible. Also at the end, where I finally got to sit on a couch, were some stunning still lives, one of which had a delicious looking cut watermelon.

Many of these paintings I felt as if I had seen them in books, and now I actually got to see them in real life. It was amazing. I ate bread, tomatoes, cheese, salami, and grapes in the museum lobby and headed back to the train station.

I spent yesterday (Monday) morning attempting to figure out which courses I will be taking with an advisor Tiziana Labriola. Her office is on the second floor (primo piano) where there is an ancient museum filled with different animals preserved in jars. There are a million different kinds of frogs, birds, and a big petrified lion. At our meeting, Tiziana talked very fast and printed lots of paper off to give to me. I feel now that I might be able to figure this out, to finish my major here in Italy and be able to graduate when I get back. Maybe. Problem is, each department at the University of Bologna is on a different time schedule for when they start and end the semester. Some even have trimesters or quadmesters instead. I am going to need to contact each professor individually to find out when their class is. Exams are a nightmare: they usually take place at the end of the semester three weeks after school ends! Picture taking a 20 minute oral exam that determines whether or not you pass a class you have attended all semester! I would wet myself. Apparently they are made easier for foreign students, but we will see.

I went to take a dvd back to the Biblioteca Salaborsa, found out it has strange hours like every other building and was closed, then headed back to the bus stop. On the way I decided to stop to see the library for the Department of Natural Sciences, and on the way to the second floor a poster caught my eye talking about water on Mars. Instead of giving an email address, it told me to go to the next floor and talk to a professor about participating. In this way I met Professor Barbieri, one of those scientists who is looking for water on Mars. The building in which his office sits is hundreds of years old, but his research is incredibly recent. By comparing different formations on Mars and Earth, Pr. Barbieri has shown that there are many similarities between landforms formed by water here in the deserts of our planet and areas found on Mars. Talking to him I was almost convinced that the massive investment that we've made sending little spacecrafts out to crawl over the planet and take grainy photographs has been worth it because the discovery of even the most simple form of life on this planet could completely overturn our current view of life. If life was ever present on Mars, this means that it may exist on many more planets than we initially thought.

Barbieri and I talked entirely in Italian, and he showed me pictures of his research. It was interesting discussing the most miniscule form of life on a distant planet while on the wall behind us there was a satellite image of Europe, green and chock full of people and plants and animals already. I think I am going to take a Paleontology class with this professor now, but we will see.

I headed home and was late for lunch after buying bread at the local grocery store COOP, and afterwards I read about bikes online and in books and then set out on a quest for Decathlon, a bike store. After taking the Red Ruby (name for crappy bike) to the Salaborsa and returning the DVD, I took a bus out to the edge of town and accidently got off too soon before the mall.

Asking for directions in Bologna is interesting. It goes like this: I begin walking up to a store. EVERYONE sitting out front, mostly old people, stare at me and become hushed as I walk up. I mumble my question in bad Italian, someone shouts Eh, I say it again in different words, and then all of them start giving me advice at once and I get hardly anything out of it. Anyways, finally one man pointed in a direction and I began to walk in that direction. After weaving around several apartment buildings, I found one of the most beautiful views I have yet encountered in this distant country: a garden.

It was raining, and I went through an iron gate and walked around in one of the largest commune gardens I have ever seen. Each plot was different, and many of the pathways were covered by makeshift tile walkways. Many gardens had huge cabbages, squashes, cucumbers, and peppers in neat rows sticking out of the ground or bamboo shelters under which sat plastic chairs. Ivy covered much of these shelters and would shade them if the day was not so gray. Small buildings were located in the middle of this sea of garden, and there were tables around which I could picture older people playing the card game I encountered at the airport upon first arriving to this country. My shoes got muddy walking along the smaller paths, and I really wish that I was part of this great creation project.

I pushed my way over a hill, jumped a fence, and arrived at the mall. After putting my backpack in a locker before entering the store (really? another difference...) I talked with Alessandro, one of the helpers, in Italian and he immediately referred me to another bicycle shop that is close to the train station to buy a bike. By the way, my favorite word in Italian is allora. It is the equivalent of 'alright then' in English, or 'okay, so...' All the bikes there were crap for what I needed them for, but I got some good tips from Alessandro and looked at accessories for a long time. Buying a bike is going to be difficult for me. I need the right size, the right pedals for shoes, shoes with metal parts that don't scrape the ground, a good pump and repair kit, mounting places to hold my stuff, a lock or two or three, and a hundred other things. Last night I sat down at my desk and wrote furiously for half an hour about all the stuff I will need. I am going to truly think about each piece now while I have time before school starts and find the best place to buy it, whether online or at a store. I have money to buy all the stuff, but the less I spend on the bike, or the more wisely I spend it on the bike, the more I have for wine and cheese and bread.

I am going to be travelling from town to town across the Italian countryside and using couchsurfing.com to book a sofa at successive towns. I am incredibly excited about this because sleeping on a couch is cheap and a great way to meet people, and it means I no longer have to carry a blanket or sleeping bag or any of that. Less weight means more enjoyment. Many of the best places to go on long trips are along the west coast of Italy, so I will be needing to take the train a ways to get to these, but my first trip will be to the hills near Bologna to see what is over there.

I could say a million things about the bike I want and all the tools I intend to buy, but maybe I'll save that for another day. I woke up early this morning to go running, but it is raining ourside (Piove molto a Bologna). I have several meetings to make it to today, but they will get done. I CAN NOT WAIT to start biking!

Housemates and Erasmus students having dinner in my tiny apartment.

I miss my bike in North Carolina. It's name was Red Bean, and it took me everywhere super fast. Here in Italy, my bike is red, but I can't fly like I used to. On Thursday I was biking to my CILTA course when the bike broke. This had been coming for a long time, and I did not have the right tools with me so I left in in a piazza and headed to class with black oil all over my hands. Drat. So last night on the way to yet another gathering of Erasmus students, or exchange students from Europe, at the Piazza San Stefano I took a pair of pliers and fixed the thing. The pants guard broke off and was trailing on the ground, so I just yanked back some medal and pulled it off the pedal and now the bike runs. However, while I was repairing the bike two Italian students stopped by to ask me to uncork their bottle of champagne. I did so, in the process accidentally spilling lots of champagne on my bike, and proceeded to have a conversation with them in Italian. Both girls are taking the final exams for their archaeology majors here at the University of Bologna, and both were celebrating the completion of one test and gearing up to study for yet another. I finished the glass, said 'Ciao,' and proceeded to the party.

Making friends is very difficult when I do not have a common language with another person. Most of the time I feel like I make people laugh and am pretty happy, but with the Italians I have met on campus or many of the German Erasmus students who don't speak Italian well, there is a very large language barrier. If we could all speak Italian well we would be best friends already, but such is not the case. I took four semesters of Italian language courses at UNC, went to Italian club, talked in Italian to my friends, and have been living in Italy with Italian room mates for two weeks, and still I have lots of trouble getting out even the simplest phrases. I'm sure that it will go better, but by that time there will be lots of students I have met who could have been good friends but for the lack of a common language.

On the upside, my housemates have learned to live with and even make the best of my lack of language skills. I've taught them and they've taught me some pretty awesome phrases I won't mention on this blog, but I will mention my favorite. "Cazza" pronounced "kat-za," is the equivalent of crap or darn or whatever. It is really fun to say; try saying it right now in front of your computer or the next time you stub your toe. Cazza!

My language skill are often lacking in the supermarket or the small shops and cafes around Bologna as well. I want to talk to the baristas or the waiters, but sometimes I get raised eyebrows. This morning I went to buy bread at a place that I buy bread from very often. The store is to the right and then to the left, alla derecha and poi giro sinistra, and the bread is incredibly delicious. The two ladies that work behind the counter now see me as sort of a regular. I get the same delicious bread every time and just point at it. To cut it up and eat it, my housemates work very fast to break off a piece and stuff it in their mouths. We cut the bread like the cheese right on the table cloth and then shake the table cloth off afterwards on the balcony. The bread melts like butter in our mouths, and we tend to eat it with everything. While the store is very nice, it is also pretty cheap and I can get a large loaf of bread for 1 euro. The turnover rate for bread here is pretty fast, so I buy it every day.

I've been trying pretty hard to make Italian friends and not hang out with the exchange students, but many of them are actually pretty cool. While partying with them is fun, I've been making an effort to do other activities as well. Honestly, I'm getting pretty tired of going to Erasmus parties.

So on Thursday night I decided to introduce my room mates to some of the Erasmus students. My room mates are awesome. Their names are:

Marco: Marco works at the hospital as part of three required years of work after obtaining his degree from the University of Bologna. We went running the other day and he has this awesome way of going up the little hills in the nearby park where he breathes out really fast and he starts sprinting. Marco is from a small town of only 600 people and he has a very strong, but very cool sounding, dialect which sometimes makes it difficult for me to understand him.

Davide: Davide stays in the other bed in this room. He is a very nice and patient person and makes the effort to ask how my day went or what I've been doing so we can talk Italian. He plays guitar in a punk rock band called Distance, which I would never have guessed at first glance. Davide has a girlfriend in another city and so goes away pretty much every weekend to see her. This weekend, all three of my roomates have left to visit girlfriends or parents. Sigh.

Giulio: The crazy one of the group, Giulio cooks lunch most of the time and I do the dishes. All my house mates eat very fast, so fast that it is very difficult for me to keep up. At the moment Giulio is studying for an exam next week and has to read a great long paper in English when he knows none. He handles the bills and the technicalities of the apartment.

For dinner on Thursday I made some delicious lasagna. All of my room mates had reservations about my cooking beforehand, but afterwards they agreed that it was delicious. Marco's mom apparently makes lasagna that is much better, and I will probably get to try some soon. Cooking in the tiny kitchen of our apartment is a challenge. I had to make two different lasagnas so that they would fit in the oven. I also made an epic salad doused with salt and olive oil, and when people started to arrive we cracked open a couple bottles of wine and sat down to a 2 hour dinner. All my Erasmus friends had to talk in Italian so that their words could be understood by my housemates, and after several glasses of wine and helpings of lasagna I kicked back on the small brown couch in our kitchen for a while to watch the whole spectacle.

Afterwards I headed out with the Erasmus students to get some gelato and to go to another girl's apartment for a party. After that I headed to Corbo Maltese and danced the night away with four Germans. While at the bar I discovered that another exchange student from Austria used to teach dancing lessons, so hopefully I will gain that skill as well before I come back. That may be a language even more difficult than Italian.

A window (una finestra) of La Torre Asinelli.


A view to the east from the top of the tower.


The church of San Petronio.


Final ceramics pieces at the festival in Faenza.

There are so many things that are different in Italy, little things like people putting their arm out into the street for the bus to stop and big things like trains that are used by everyone. Coffee cups are smaller, cars are tiny, and there are shops that sell loafs of fresh bread in the morning for 1 euro that I am a sucker for.

I went to buy a phone on Thursday (telephonino) and, after telling the attendant in a very roundabout way that I just wanted the cheap phone that all the other students get, I stepped outside and realized I was beside the two towers at the center of Bologna. I thought 'Why not?' and walked over to the entrance to the largest one, La Torre Assinelli, and started to climb the stairs. And I climbed. And climbed. All of the steps were super sketchy: they were made of wood and tiny and the staircases were very narrow as they wound up the tower. Looking out over the side, it seemed as if I might fall forever through the center of the tower as I slipped. There were holes in the side of the tower which I would pass by. Every time, I would be startled by the rush of wind through the holes. At first I thought they had to do with some attempt at maintaining the structural integrity of the tower, but now I think they were meant to keep the tower cool on this warm day. The inside of the tower was dim and dark, but a good dark.

On the way up, there were porticoed windows evenly spaced along the ascent so that I got glimpses of the city as my legs got sorer. Each time I felt like I could stare out the window for ages. There was one window in particular that stood out in my mind. This window opened up from the dim interior of the tower into the bright daylight of Bologna, and people had thrown coins up to 2 Euro onto the window ledge. Beyond the coins were the red roofs of Italy, and old crumbling bricks surrounded the window, the tower, and pretty much everything. There was something symbolic about this image that I am still trying to figure out.

Finally I made it to the top, and the wind that had blown against the tower on the way up was even stronger up here. The hot day was balanced by the cool wind. The view was amazing and stretched beyond the perifery (la periferia) of Bologna into the landscape beyond. On the edge, the red roofs stopped and the modern looking factories and buildings began. I struck a very cool pose on one of the ledges and looked out on the city while a few other tourist made their way around the platform. Below me I could see all of the buildings that make up the living spaces of thousands of people crammed into this tiny area. The most beautiful shades of each color are chosen to paint the walls of this city, and they all go well with the red tiled roofs. Bologna is very three-dimensional, and people are packed into each living space. People live behind the shades that open onto each street, and many even live in quarters below the street.

Looking east from the tower I saw the agricultural plain spread out, but to the west the green foothills of the Appenines beckoned. Tucked away in the hills are seemingly random beautiful buildings which I must visit before my time here is up. Domes and columns seem to just pop out of the green sea.

Below me I could see the unfinished front of the San Petronio church. The Catholic Church wanted to build a great big amazing cathedral here back in the day, but funds were diverted to pay for another project and the front scaffold is only half finished. The part that is done looks beautiful covered with inset sculptures but the rest looks just like the side of the tower, crumbling brick. San Petronio was part of the impetus for Martin Luther's growing disdain for the profligacy (right word?) of the Catholicism back in the day. From the top of the tower, the building is only one part of a huge city, but on the ground and from the inside it looks huge as well. I have not made it yet to the inside, but I hope to later today.

After looking for long enough I made my way down the spiraling staircase, past the windy holes in the tower and the window covered with money. I tried to make a joke about getting an elevator with the worker at the bottom and failed miserably. I feel like I'm a pretty funny person, but making a joke is difficult when it takes so long to form the words.

I later found out that it is unlucky for students to go to the top of the tower before the semester begins . Whatever. There used to be over 200 towers built by wealthy nobles in Bologna during the height of the Renaissance or the peak the city's wealth or something, and only a handful of them are still standing. I am not sure whether they crumbled into dust or whether they were taken down to make room for more tiny apartments and shops. Several of the towers still standing are visible from the top of La Torre Asinelli, and for some reason they remind me of the statues of Easter Island. Rich people long ago built these tall buildings I guess to declare their wealth to the world, like great big monuments to their money. In many instances this part of human nature seems to continue to this day, maybe taking other forms. Beats me, I'm just a student.

I didn't figure out how to turn my phone on until two days after, and now I have the numbers of my three roomates, a bunch of other exchange students, and the Italian girl I met on the plane ride in my phone. Saturday I travelled to Ravenna by bus with other Erasmus students and spent most of the time trying to keep the conversation going with a German girl so that I could practice my Italian. The beach was covered with bars and nightclubs that stretched for long distances in either direction along the shore. Although I had imagined the Italian coast to be full of light brown rocks jutting out of the water surrounded by beautiful aquamarine water, the Mediterranean in this area was dark brown and reminded me of the water on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. We all sat on the sand because the nice beach chairs cost lots of money and I left my stuff with some friends and jumped in the ocean. The beach was very wide and the slope very shallow, and there were no dunes like in North Carolina. All of the chairs were evenly spaced up to the water and made a grid pattern that is visible in Google Earth. I splashed for a while on the beach then headed back to shore to eat the hard day old bread I bought with Nutella. If bread is not eaten within a day it gets very hard, but this can be resolved by putting it in the microwave (micronde) for a while as I discovered last night. The wind blew hard on the beach and sand got into everything; I am still wiping it out of my ears.

I played some kind of paddle game with a group of German girls who would only speak German if they did not want me to know what they were saying, then I played a game of foosball, bought a beer, and kicked back to wait for the party to start. When it did, I moved to the nightclub next door where there were fake palm trees on which different colors of light danced like the people around them. I took a place on a wooden platform and danced for a long time. Dancing in Italy is interesting because many girls dress scantily and dance like crazy but reject guys every time they try to make a move. I was just doing my own thing and sometimes moving into groups with other exchange students but... ANYway, suffice it to say that I danced for a long time. The bus ride back was long at 2 AM and I caught the night bus home from the station with a guy from Britain and a guy from Australia. I stood up most of the time so I could feel the sway of the bus, the acceleration and deceleration, in my body, like being buffeted around by forces beyond my control.

Sunday was a tad of a catastrope. I set out in the morning to go to a festival in Faenza, which is east of Bologna, but I ended up making timely mistakes with the bus and the train. I had never been to an European train station before, and no other Erasmus students had expressed interest in going with me so I was trying to make it to the festival alone. I made all the mistakes: confusing departures and arrival, going to the wrong platform, and waiting for a long time for a train that would never come. I kept thinking how many of my friends would have figured it out by now. Problem is, I'm not my friends. I'm me, and I make mistakes, and I am beginning to just smile and be okay with that.

I finally caught the right train and headed towards the ceramics festival, where I was expecting to see master pot makers from around the world make these enormous clay creations. Out the window, many of the fields we passed by were plowed with great big chunks of dirt tossed up all around. Some had been dried by the sun to a light brown color and some were still dark. I like to imagine that at some point in the drying out the dirt is the same color as the roofs of the decaying houses. Trees bordered all of the fields, Poplars I think, to protect against the wind.

In Faenza fall was coming, and I walked down the main street to the Museo Internazionale delle Ceramiche. I was very hungry, and after getting directions from the worker at the front I walked to the Pizza del Popolo and had un panino vegetale at a cafe looking over the Piazza. I thought that the great competition between the pot makers was supposed to take place at 6, so I settled down to read and chill out. It was quiet at first, but all of a sudden people crowded the cafe and an Italian woman sat across from me. She asked questions in her Italian dialect about what I was doing in Italy, what I would be studying, the usual, as she drank her cappucino, then she wished me tanti auguri and left for home.

I walked over to the festival at 6, but for some reason I missed the competition and now they were simply auctioning off final pieces. What a failure of a day! I made my way back slowly to the train station, got on a crowded train headed back for Bologna, and stood the whole time with my head resting on the baggage shelf.

Now I know how the train station works at least, and I am still set on buying a nice bike and touring around this country. Buying a bike for the city is strange because they get stolen and resold so often. Apparently creepy guys on bikes shlalom slowly up and down the Via Zamboni at certain hours of the day and just sell the bikes they are on for 20 euro or so. I think I am going to buy one bike for touring and one for the city so that my nice bike does not get ganked.

Today I hope to see San Petronio and to go look at a nearby bike store. We will see how it goes. I have learned to make coffee in our tiny coffee maker, to light the stove using a lighter, to wash dishes in the tiny sink and to open our front door in the dark. I have had a hard time adjusting to the amount of food that is eaten at my apartment though because I am used to eating so much and my housemates (i coinqualini) seem to eat very little. But I will get over it, for mine is a heart made of steel! I also went to the library yesterday right next to the Fontana di Nettuno, and on the library floor there are glass tiles which allow pedestrians to see through to the old library made of bricks that lies beneath. Old Italy and New Italy.

I have more I could say, but I don't want to get carpel tunnel and I want to look at bikes now. Ciao tutti!

First 3 days in Bologna

The view from my apartment on the fourth floor of an apartment building. My place is on Via Vizzani.

A statue in a deserted courtyard in the same building as the Ufficio Internazionale at 33 Via Zamboni.

The Amsterdam airport early in the morning.

One of the many walls that line the porticoed sidewalks. This one is adorned with frescoes which passersby who are not tourists seem hardly to notice.

Bologna is a city where modern technology is shaped to fit into ancient buildings, where every direction a person looks on every street there is graffiti and decaying posted ads on crumbling bricks, where the drivers are insane and the streets are choked with motorists and bicycles but somehow no one gets hurt. Bologna is beautiful because the women dress vicariously and the men all wear aviators, because there is a cafe on every corner and flower boxes hanging above every alleyway, and because sidewalks are covered by porticoed roofs.

I left last Monday, and the plane ride to get to Bologna was atrocious. The first step, getting on the plane, was the worst because in that moment I decisively made one of the biggest decisions of my life. I first flew to Detriot, where I took two Benadryll, then headed off across the Atlantic to Amsterdam. For the whole flight, I just could not sleep because of the excitement and because of the thoughts I was having about the people I left in North Carolina. I tried to watch the Watchmen and read but most of the time I just stared into space with the same strange feeling I woke up with that morning that my world was changing. Uffa.

The Amsterdam airport was very clean with vodka and chocolate for purchase everywhere. I paid too much for a scone and some strawberry juice and settled down to write and watch the sunrise.

While waiting for the airplane I watched six or seven Italians play a card game I didn't know. I rarely understood their words and so I sat most of the time smiling stupidly and trying to pick them apart. All of the cards were different from the ones we use in the United States.

After a 3 hour layover in the Netherlands I met an Italian girl just before boarding the plane. She had been in Austin, Texas learning English, but we did our best to talk in Italian. After the flight, we talked while the luggage was coming out of the baggage terminal and I found that she studies medicine (medicina) at the University of Bologna like here sister. Like many other Italians since then, she offered to help me figure out what I'm doing in this new country.

The first impression I got of Bologna was not white sculptures or ancient churches. It was the driving. After picking me up, my taxi driver proceeded to nonchalantly weave in and out of fast moving traffic on the way to the hostel, laughing and correcting my Italian. I arrived at the ostello San Sisto and proceeded to meet five or six other exchange students, none of them from the United Stated. I decided before I left that I need to make Italian friends or friends that don't speak English, and I've done a pretty good job so far.

I arrived around noon (mezzogiorno) and did my best to get settled in. After buying a telephone card I fought with the public phone for an hour and a half trying to call all the people I found online and had very little success. Finally, after making Chiara at the front desk help me many times, I left for the city center (il centro) to meet Gal. Here were the streets of Bologna I had heard of, porticoed and covered sidewalks where people always seem to be in a hurry. I got lost, found my way, got lost again, and finally arrived at Gal's house to discover that he had given my room away twenty minutes before. Uffa! It was all good though because we had a cappucino and talked for about an hour before we left to get a slushie. Slushie has another name here which I forget. I lost Gal and his friends (i suoi amici) in the crowd.

Around 8 I headed over to the Hotel Academico to meet Sara Mazza, the only other person doing this program, for dinner. We stopped at some little restaurant whose name I have forgotten. I had squid, she had spaghetti, we polished off a liter of the house wine, and talked about our concerns with our experience in Italy, what we had left behind in the States, and what is waiting for us in the next ten months.

We finished eating and I said goodbye to her at the hotel. I walked to the station and caught the wrong bus back to the hostel (21 instead of 21B in case you are ever in Bologna) and ended up getting made fun of by the driver and his girlfriend. This would not be the first time that I would get criticized for not knowing English. It won't be the last, and it hurt pretty good. I got off that bus, caught 21B, and after meeting several strangers at the bus stop arrived back at the hostel around 1AM. I hung out till 2 with people outside, then got up at 7:30 AM the next day for breakfast and so I could check the internet.



I arrived at the first Intensive Italian course in the morning and was immediately surprised at how much the students there wanted to speak English. I arrived late (tardi) and embaressed. After talking with Sara for a while, I would go out on the edge and try to use tenses or words that no one else was using with the teacher correcting me the whole time. Whenever she left the room it seemed to me that people just began to speak English again. I would also wonder why I would want to talk Italian when our common language was English, but the same feeling used to pervade the classrooms at UNC. For the last three days, I have made a true effort to stay away from foreigners and get to know Italians: the Italians at the hotel, the people I meet when going to look at rooms, the professors.

After leaving the classroom students congregated in the courtyard, but I left early so that I could go check out the apartment I live in now. I will be spending the next year with three Italians who know hardly any English. This forces me to learn Italian because there is no other way for us to communicate about important household matters. We ate spaghetti and they waited patiently for me to get across something I wanted to say and helped me along.

This apartment is on the fourth floor (quarto piano) and has a balcony from which I can see red tiled buildings and sheets hung off ledges swaying in the wind. It is so beautiful here. I don't live in the city center, but I am going to buy a bike soon so that I can easily commute and get my exercise at the same time. Both of the guys currently at the house have broken bikes, but they don't seem angry or sad about it at all. This is how it goes, come va. Bikes get stolen often in Bologna and resold for 10-20 Euro, and that is how it goes. All of the streets are narrow and people go as fast as they can in cars and on scooters inches away from pedestrians, and that is how it goes.

I walked around on my own for much of the day after visiting the apartment, enjoying Bologna and looking at all the wall art and arches that Italians seem to easily pass by. The ancient is combined with the modern. Everywhere I look there is something else to entertain or divert me. I don't know how I could ever concentrate in a culture like this.

Last night I went to the Giardino di Margherita and danced the night away with a bunch of exchange students. I felt very proud of myself after the party because I introduced three guys from Portugal to three girls from Germany and they ended up getting along real well and talking mostly in Italian. I could feel the city move around me last night. All of the cars, the hurried pedestrians, the buses, the flickering street lights, all of it spoke movement. So beautiful.

Today I managed to move into my room. I ate pesto with spaghetti with Giulio and Davide, and I have eaten very slowly ever since I arrived because it is difficult for me to form my thoughts while I eat. Also it gives me more time to talk. Afterwards I returned to the city center to go to the International Relations office and spent two and a half hours waiting and talking to meet with an advisor. I have learned all the vowel sounds in Dutch and have learned to count to ten in German. This city is full not only of Italians but of people from all different nationalities with all different languages, like a happy Babel. And all the languages: French, German, Dutch, Belgian Dutch, Scottish, Arabic, all of them sound so beautiful.

Finally I returned to the apartment and had dinner with my housemate. He speaks hardly any English but is still a huge fan of Blink 182.

Before I go further, I just want to note how surprised I am of the American influence in this country. At the discoteca, the DJs played primarily American songs so that after flying over the whole Atlantic to get to this country I did not get the opportunity to dance to hardly any songs created by Italians (which, by the way, does not mean I didn't have a rip roaring good time). But it stinks that after going to such lengths to immerse myself in a culture they seem to take after the place I came from so much. I keep wishing that Italians would listen to Italian music and watch Italian movies, and I have found that not to be the case. Many of them are translated, but still.

My roommate is awesome. We went and drank beer at a really old bar tonight and he told me how to say a million things in Italian. I am unsure whether I want to even continue attending the Italian course because I feel like I learn so much more just from hanging out with or even partying with Italians. While the Italian course is full of English speakers, there are none here, and it is better that way.

Millions of tiny differences exist between Chapel Hill and Bologna. They flush the toilet differently and there is a biglie in each bathroom. They have no respect for other drivers but never get angry. Businessmen and students go to work and school on moped. Hardly anyone exercises because they go so many place on bike or by foot. I already feel like I belong in this place, where there are so many things to get people angry but they remain so calm and collected. I love it here. I will sip cappucino on my balcony at 7:30 tomorrow morning, look out at the city, and be happy.