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.