Bologna, Italy

May 13th
Leaving Rome with delightfully full tummies, we settled into our train ride to the land of O-S-C-A-R (sorry, I had to...). the train ride was gorgeous, snaking through the Italian countryside.

.:PIC COMING SOON:.

Arriving in Bologna was no big deal, and we quickly sought out the bus that we were told would drop us right in front of our hotel on the outskirts of town in just 15 short minutes. Thirty-five minutes later, we discovered that we'd taken the damn thing in the wrong direction and had to go baaaaack to where we started to start again. Rad. A 15-minute trip took an hour and 20 minutes.

After finally settling into our (surprisingly nice) hotel, we hopped the bus back to the center of Bologna to forage for food. We found a cute, old school little place and ordered anything that had bolognese sauce (when in Rome...dammit, too late?). We had one mission in Bologna: eat. And that we did. I hate to say it, and perhaps its because we didn't have a local guide or anything, but since we didn't really know what we were doing, I wasn't terribly impressed by the bolognese. Mine own's pretty good, if I'm to toot my own horn, and I could compete with the stuff we had...

May 14th
Okay, so I lied. We had two missions: eat and relax. After 16 straight days of hardcore tourist-ing, we were whooped, and looked forward to laying around and not going out to see anything. That's right. We hoofed it to Bologna to lay around in the hotel (which we did, until 3pm) and eat. No lines, no crowds, no history. Hell, no pics. Now that's vacation.

We slept late, slinked into the hotel's breakfast, and headed back for the pillows. We watched TV (someone was smiling down on me: an old episode of Project Runway was on. The season with Christian....so happy.). I took a nap and a whirlpool bath. When we finally emerged, we ate gelato, did some shopping (I heart H&M), and had pizza for dinner. A much-needed nice, easy day...

.:PIC COMING SOON:.

May 15th
Venice-bound...buuuuuut, thanks to a nationwide strike of some public transportation services, we weren't able to take the bus back to the bus station to make our train. Awesome. The folks at the front desk of our hotel suggested calling a taxi. Um, no. If I've learned one thing on this trip (albeit a negative outlook), its that everyone is trying to get ahead, and many times, that equates to screwing someone else out of their money. I'm not a natural fan of cabs. I'm just not. Between base fares and per-kilometer fares and tips and meters, I just don't enjoy the experience. So, we pushed back a little bit and took the hotel's shuttle (for which we paid 10Euro, rather than '15 or 20Euro' for a cab, thankyouverymuch).

Overall opinion: I'm extremely glad that we took a few days to mellow out in Bologna. It definitely refreshed us for the last long leg of our journey, and may have even slowed the pace on our upcoming cities. The food wasn't the most fantastic thing I've ever experienced, but we may not be at the place in our lives to be spending the money necessary to enjoy such delecacies...