La Doche Vita

So as you might of heard due to a French strike my plane from Italy to Morocco was canceled yesterday (still trying to wrap my head around that). So this has given me several more days in which to enjoy la doche vita here in Italy. So I decided I would, like when I finished backpacking, give you the run down on some of the best (and some of the worsts) of a year abroad in Bologna Italy.


Traveling in Italy

• Best Day Trip: Cinque Terre
• Best Old Medieval Town: Siena
• Most Overrated Town: Pisa
• Places I will regret not visiting: Pompei, the Amalfi Coast, & The San Siro
• Favorite Bike Trip: Biking around Lake Garda
• Best Beach: Cefalu
• Best Church: St. Peter's at the Vatican
  
• Number one place I would recommend going in Italy: Sicily
  

Food and Drink

• Best Pasta: Anything Bolognese
• Best Pizza: Spoconapoli on Via San Vitale (owners originally from Naples)
• Best Vino: Chianti
• Best Beer: Stick to anything German, Belgium, Irish, or Czech (As there is a reason the Italians are not known for their beer)
  

Bologna

• Favorite Place in Bologna: San Luca
• Thing I will miss most about Bologna: SAIS Bologna Center and the students
• Thing I will not miss about Bologna: Dog poop, people do not clean up after their dogs here!
• Craziest Italian Moment: Riding to an Ultimate Frisbee Tournament, while an Italian drove...I was never so happy to get safely out of the car!
  

Giro d'Italia

Well I have now officially been to two of the three "Grand Tours" of cycling. I have now been to the Giro D'italia and Le Tour de France, but still need to make it to the Vuelta a Espana. Today I made a quick (because of finals it had to be quick) trip to Ferrara to see the 14th stage of the Giro d'Italia kick off. So far none of the stages had been at all close to Bologna, but today's stage started in Ferrara which is only 30 mins by train. So within just a couple hours I was able to go to Ferrara, watch the riders warm up, see them off, and be back in Bologna to study again! In Fact while I am writing this the riders are several hours away from finishing still!

The 14th Stage runs from Ferrara to Asolo. If I had lots of time today I would of loved to watch it from on top of the Monte Grapa Mountain, as those always look like really fun spots to watch cycling. While this was definitely not like watching the Tour de France finish in Paris it still was a lot of fun. Still the road the cyclists even started on in Ferrara was cobblestone just the Champs de Elysee in Paris.

Warm up area in Ferrara, all the cyclists would come by here

The Italian national champion (that is why his jersey looks like the Italian flag) stopped to sign some autographs and take some photos

All the cyclists at the start

Waiting for the stage to start. We were literally standing right on the road with nothing between us and the bikers (I almost got hit by a bike actually! you can see a bike come really close to me in the video later)

Team Garmin's (an American team) support car with all the extra bikes

Instead of taking pictures of the start of the race I took a video. So you can see how close I am to the action (probably too close) , but it was really cool. As you can see since the stage only just started they riders are not going that fast yet. No doubt they also want to save some energy for the big mountain climb as that is where this stage will be won or lost later in the day.

Overall it was a really cool to see a part of the 2010 Giro, I would love to see more of it, but that is life, enjoy what you can. This will almost for sure be my last excursion here in Italy as I have a couple more things to finish up for Finals and then fly to Morocco this coming Thursday! It has been a fun year in Italy and this was a great last trip!

Cinque Terre

So now that finals have begun clearly I should have no time left to travel....right?!? Well turns out my first final is not until this Friday. So after spending the weekend and Monday doing as much studying and paper writing as possible I decided it was time for a break. So I checked the weather and saw that it was foretasted to be a beautiful day in Cinque Terre on Tuesday so I decided to make a "quick" day trip.

Quick is a relative term as the train ride is about three and a half hours each way. Lucky for me that gave me a decent amount of time to study and edit papers even more (you can never quite escape studying during finals). So early tuesday morning (6:27) I was on the first train out to Cinque Terre.

I will say that it was a great choice. It was perfectly sunny all day long, between 70-75 degrees, and a nice breeze off of the Ocean. Cinque Terre is five towns strung along the western coast of Italy, it is unique because the towns are sandwiched between Mountains on the one side and the Ocean on the other. In between all of the towns there are walking paths so you can go from one town to another all on foot. To do the whole walk takes about 3-5 hours if you do it straight. As one might expect the Italian beaches, food, vino, and other distractions slow you down a bit! I will not say too much more about my trip as I think the pictures tell the story of the day best!

Path along the cliffs

Town of Manarola

Swimming Cove

Making my way to Corniglia

Town of Corniglia

Corniglia and Manarola from above

Coast line in Vernazza

Ocean...amazing

Coastline and the town of Montorosso in the distance (btw...I want that boat!)

As you can probably tell (if you can't get your eyes checked) it was absolutely beautiful! Only drawback is the insane number of tourists. I probably heard 10x more English and even German then I did Italian throughout the day (quite a difference from Bologna where it is only Italian). Still despite the high tourist population it was more than worth the trip, my only regret was not having more than a day to spend there.

SAIS Bologna Class of 2010

(Picture: SAIS Bologna Class of 2010, you will probably have to expand the picture by clicking on it to find me as I am hiding towards the back on the left-center part of the picture)

Hard to believe it, but in just over a week my time here in Bologna will officially be over! Classes are now finished and all that is left is papers and finals. Stay tuned though as after I finish up here in Bologna I will be on to Fez in Morocco for about two months where I will be living and studying Arabic!

Viagreggio

Well for awhile now I have been hoping to make it back to the Italian beaches! After all I thought by May the weather would be perfect every day here in Italy! Well it turns out that there seems to be a lot of clouds and rain in the spring here in Italy and the hot Italian summer has not yet descended on us (this I guess is also a good thing as my apartment does not have AC).

Beach in Viagreggio

At any rate the weather on Sunday was decent and I decided to make a trip to the beach town of Viagreggio! What made this extra cool was that one of my roommates, Connor, from my senior year at Wartburg was in Italy on a May Term trip. So early in the morning I met up with him and a number of other Wartburg students in Florence and then we grabbed a train towards the beach. Along the way we stopped in Pisa as none of them had seen it before, and it is of course one of the great Italian staples. Finally a bit after mid-day we arrived in the town of Viagreegio. The weather was decent and we even were brave enough to get in the water for a while before getting cold and retreating to the beach to relax. As the day moved on the clouds rolled in and the temperature dropped and we took it as our hint to start heading back. All in all it was a fun trip and good to see some of my former Wartburg friends!

Siena

Well after my botched bike trip to Siena a couple weeks ago I decided yesterday to take a day trip to Siena and acutlly see the town. I went with two other friends from SAIS, and the traveling was not all smooth sailing this time around either. This was due to the fact that it was May 1st yesterday, which is a big holiday here in Europe. So being oblivious Americans we had not really thought about this and had to deal with some strange train schedules, canceled buses, and closed shops. Still despite all this we managed to make it to Siena and have a great time.

We left Bologna for Florence at 6:45 (cheap trains leave early!), but when we got into Florence we found out that none of the buses that normally go inbetween Florence and Siena were not going due to it being a holiday. Not dettered we checked the train schedule and while it was reduced we still managed to get a train to Siena later in the day. We ended up having several hours though in Florence (what a rough thing to have happen to someone) and wandered the streets checking out some of the more famous churches, sculptures, and bridges. Finally when it was time to go we ended up on a train that was literally overflowing with people, which made for a less than comfortable journey to Siena.

Me in front of the Ponte Vecchio in Florence

Once in Siena we made our way to the main square Piazza del Campo, which is probably what the city is best known for. The square is a huge open space with really cool buildings all around it. Twice a year they actually turn the square into a horse racing arena and race horses around the square! If you have seen the newest James Bond film (Quantum of Solace), this is the square where James Bond early in the movie was chasing the bad guys through a tourist filled square where there was a horse race going on. So needless to say it was a really cool square! Thus we decided to eat lunch at a restaurant right on the square and enjoy some of the local food and wine (Chianti!), both of which were very good. After lunch we did as the locals (or maybe just all the tourists) and lounged in the square soaking up all the sun (we had a beautiful day). The rest of the day we spent wandering the town (which is all still medieval looking) and admiring the different buildings and the rolling hills of Tuscany all around the city. We also ran into several other SAIS students as a good number of students made their way down to Siena or were in Tuscany for the weekend as well.

Piazza del Campo in Siena

Duomo

Medieval Streets (you can see the tower from the main square in the picture too)

Another cool building in Siena with an assortment of different medieval flags

Tuscan Country side

Finally around eight in the evening we boarded the train and made our way back to Bologna. All in all it proved to be a great trip, both to Florence and particularity Siena.