Friend Festival!

We had a full house this weekend. Kathryn (a friend of Jeannie's from her undergrad) got here, from Japan, on Thursday night. Jeannie and I busted out our Italian cooking skills and made eggplant Parmesan. Jon (pronounced 'yon') and his girlfriend Meredith (Jon was visiting her while she studies in Geneva) got here on Friday morning at 5:30. So I got up at 5:10 to go meet them. I was 10 minutes late, but I had planned on that cause I figured either their train would be late or they would be dazed enough not to really care. And in the end their train was late. 

We spent most of Friday eating pizza and gelato. I tried a new flavor (La Maria) which has rum in it and is incredible. In the evening we went to see a blues band at Jeannie's school and after that we went to a sort of local 'bar', for lack of a better word. It is a basement apartment that some of the professors at the University of Bologna own/have permission to use. Every Friday night these professors play classic American rock for a couple hours. Its b.y.o.b. which is sort of nice, but its also really smoky. This is even more unpleasant because smoking is banned in all bars and restaurants in Italy (which, in itself, is miraculous because there are so many smokers here, they even have cigarette vending machines on the streets.)

On Saturday morning my friend Ben (who I went to the Fireworks Festival with) came in from London. All 6 of us decided to go up to San Luca, a basilica on a hill. Apparently it is featured in the climactic ending seen of a John Grisham novel but we went because there are portico's the whole way (it was sort of a rainy day) and there are excellent views from the top. 

Jon, Meredith, and Kathryn all left on Sunday. Ben (who just finished his semester) and I took this opportunity to sleep till about 1. The rest of the day, as per its start, was really lazy but we did make one important decision. We were going to go to Venice on Monday. We got up at 6:30, had eggs for breakfast, and headed for the train station. Its 2 hours by train to Venice and we got there a little after 10. Neither of us knew much about Venice, and the little that we did know was gleaned from a 4 year old travel guide while we were on the train. Apparently the site to see is Piazza San Marco and San Marco's Cathedral. Maps were out of our price range (2 euros) but we had  read that you can take water buses to see these things. We decided against this in favor of walking and following discreet yellow signs. 

In Bologna the streets are mostly on the narrower side and the buildings are mostly on the taller side. This, in combination with the porticoes (ie. covered sidewalks), go a good way towards preventing the average pedestrian from seeing the sky and completely prevent him/her from getting his/her bearings on anything. Basically, unless you know your way around, things can be a little confusing. Venice is similar, but about 5 times worse. There are lots of nice, wide streets but some of them are only as wide as a normal sidewalk, but with buildings towering up on either side.

Anyway, we got 'lost' a couple of times, although there are limits to how lost you can get, ie. if you go to far in one direction, you'll just get to the ocean. We stopped once at a grocery store to get supplies (bread and cheese) and once to sit by  the canal and eat our supplies, but we did make it to a major thoroughfare near San Marco's. So we sat down to snack a little and enjoy the sunlight. Because the alleys are too narrow to let in much light every one that walked out of an alley immediately crunched up their face and went into full squint, which was very amusing to watch. We did get bored after a while, so we walked down to check out the cathedral. It was crowded. Ben rated his desire to go in as a 3, which decreased to a 2 (on a scale of 1 to 10) after seeing the line, so we decided to walk around some more. 

At this point, the fates aligned. It was after noon, we found another grocery store, and a large piazza with nice benches. And the sun was still out, or at least trying to peak through the clouds. 

So we bought some beer and sat on the benches. We spent most of our time talking about how much we loved Italy and Venice. We found all sorts of good reasons to love Italy, delicious coffee and food being a couple. Another was that all Italians all seem to be really friendly. I hadn't had a conversation, with an Italian, in English yet (I even found out there were no free maps in Italian) and Ben, who had only gotten to Italy 2 days before, could order coffee without the host slipping into English (something that frustrated us to no end in Taiwan).

The one reason that surpassed all the rest, though, was how happy and mellow everyone seemed to be. By just sitting on a public park bench and drinking beer Ben and I were doing something that would get us arrested in the States. And, despite the fact that it was early Monday afternoon, there were crowds of other young people drinking and singing. One group even set up a sort of gauntlet that reminded me of something I had read the Iroquois Indians or medieval knights used to do. One guy wearing a wreath of leaves as a sort of crown ran through a sort of tunnel of his friends while they all slapped and hit him. When he made it out he tumbled to the ground, but everyone was laughing and having a great time (I later found out that the people wearing wreaths had just graduated). These groups often broke into loud song, but despite their antics the worst looks they got from passersby were just 'Ah, look at those young kids ... I remember when I used to be young.' 

So basically, we were enjoying ourselves. At the 3rd beer we realized that this was basically the same thing that we had done in Taiwan, ie. drink beer outside and talk. However, the reason we drink beer outside and talk is ... it's a lot of fun. We kept hanging out until we got hungry and then we went in search of cheap food. The rest of the day was mostly uneventful except that we didn't get a train back to Bologna until 11:30 and we almost missed Bologna when we got there. The train had sat for almost an hour in a station along the way so I assumed it was going to be late and set my alarm for later than our original arrival time. We ended up getting to Bologna early and sitting there too, which was fortunate because it gave me time to deliriously open my eyes, stare at a sign that said 'Bologna' for 5 seconds while the information processed, then rush off the train.