This weekend the weather was to be sunny and
clear, so I bought tickets to take me to Bologna on Saturday. Unfortunately,
the trip began poorly with a downpour in Arezzo thoroughly soaking me on the
outside, the discovery on the train that I had left my camera back at the villa
(I ended up taking pictures on my phone though), and the fact that my first 30
minutes in Bologna were spent walking in the wrong direction. However, once I
was headed the right way, the day turned out to be marvelous.
Walking along Via Independenzia towards the
center of Bologna, I saw many cafés and shops though I only stopped briefly for
the outdoor market that I found since I noticed that it had a few stalls
containing hand made items. Nothing captured my attention for too long, however,
so I continued my walk to the piazza.
When I reached the piazza, I discovered that
some sort of event was going on. Many booths were set of for a wide range of
companies that seemed to have no connection to each other (I found one for
Vodafone, one for a pastry shop, and one handing out free samples of a drink. I
ended up really liking the free pastry and drink samples) and there were two
areas roped off for performers. The first performing area had people
demonstrating parkour and the second had children on rollerskates performing to
music. However, when I first got to the piazza, I was checking out the historic
sites more so than the modern activities.
I walked around the piazza, checking out the
two castles and the Duomo. On this first lap, I only went in to the castles and
ignored the Duomo since it was closed until a little later. The first castle,
which was on the side of the Piazza, only had the courtyard open to the public,
but it was interesting to walk through anyways. The second castle, which was in
the middle of the piazza, actually had streets going through it and quite a few
cafés and shops built into its ground floor, and I thoroughly enjoyed walked
around it.
Once I was done with the piazza, I decided to
go to go see the two towers that Dante wrote about that were just down the
street. The first was rather small and extremely titlted, but the second was
incredibly tall (one of the tallest older towers in Italy actually), and I knew
that I had to climb it.
Moving incredibly slowly, I climbed up the
498 wooden steps to reach the top. However, once I was up there, I found the
experience to be completely worth it. Not only was the weather great and the
view spectacular, but there was a lovely gushing wind that felt wonderful and
quickly dried the last of the moisture from my hair (I just couldn’t resist
letting it down to be blown back).
After spending a good 45 minutes taking
pictures (my phone took some great pictures…though it was so nervere wracking
to hold it out so high up. I was scared that I would drop it!), relaxing, and
enjoying the breeze, I finally got up and began my decent. Since my last
journey down lots and lots of stairs had not been too comfortable on my leg
(back in Milan’s Duomo), I ended up using the railings and my arms to support
most of my weight…for 498 stairs. Yeah, my upper body got a great work out.
However, it did lead to a particularly amusing moment when an older woman asked
me (in Italian) if the journey up had caused the injury and I reassured her
that it was from dance.
After leaving the tower, I desperately was in
need of a bathroom. However, I couldn’t see any cafés that seemed to have one and
the McDonald’s bathrooms all required a pin code from the receipts you got when
you purchased food. Eventually, I just got fed up and sneaked into a McDonald’s
bathroom behind a woman who had a receipt. Though I got my karmic justice soon
after I exited my stall and realized that my haste had led me into the boys’
stalls. Oh well!
After that, I went back to the piazza to see
the Duomo. I wasn’t too impressed by the inside of the church, but I did end up
spending some time looking at an old fresco portraying hell with this
terrifying looking blue giant eating people, a painting of the archangel
Michael slaying a humanoid demon, and a random Foucault’s pendulum that was set
up.
By the time I left the Duomo, it was time to
start thinking about dinner. I had been recommended a restaurant near the
piazza, and I had the street name it was on, but, after 30 minutes of searching
the streets around the piazza, I still had not found it or the street, and I
gave up. I then went to try a restaurant listed in my guidebook back near the
station, but, when I found it, it looked disgustingly cheap (there were these
weird fuzzy dread-lock like things over the doorway), and I decided not to eat
there. I ended up buying lasagna at a café in the castle at the piazza that
turned out to be very tasty and then buying chips and some candy for dessert at
a convenience store as I walked back to the train station. I then took the
train back to Arezzo and a cab back to the villa where I repacked my bag for
going to Perugia the next day.
Our modern dance teacher had invited all of
the dancers to perform out choreography projects and the dance she taught us at
her studio in Perugia, and we had all accepted. So, early Sunday morning, most
of the dancers (some would come later) took the train from Arezzo to Perugia.
However, what is usually an easy one hour train ride ended up taking much
longer due to a random train strike that started at 9am and was going to end at
9pm. After worrying about being stuck in Tarantola for the whole day, our group
eventually was transferred to another train that took us to Perugia without any
more problems.
Once there, my group took the minimetro
(these adorable little metro cars that ran on a track that looked like the ones
for a rollercoaster) up the hill into the city. Once there, the large group
broke up into smaller groups, and I left with Emily P., Emily A., Emie, Meredith,
and Catherine to explore and to grab a quick lunch. Soon after breaking away,
we found one of the major piazzas (it had the Duomo in it) and we decided to
buy food there. We found a café with frescos on the ceiling where I ended up
buying two slices of some pretty good pizza. We then sat on the steps leading
up to the Duomo to eat our food.
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| On the minimetro |
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| The Duomo |
Once we were done, we went into the Duomo to
look around. I wasn’t that impressed and our group didn’t end up staying in
there for too long. We then went behind the Duomo, but only found another tiny
church and so headed back and down the main street away from the Duomo.
Following the street until it ended, we found many booths for a children’s
festival (some of the girls had a hard time not going into the face painting
booth), some student drummers on parade, and a spectacular (though very breezy)
viewing point where the street ended.
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| Children's Festival |
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| One view from the site |
After enjoying the view (you could just
barely see Assisi from where we were!) and taking a ton of pictures, we decided
to go back into the center of town in order to find some of the chocolate
Perugia was famous for. For a while, we had very little luck, but near the
Duomo, we went into a high-class chocolate/pastry shop where we all got a tasty
chocolate dessert.
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| My dessert |
After that, we took some artsy “fill in the
space” pictures in the piazza that gained us a ton of Italian teenage admirers
(it was hilarious. A huge group of them came up to us and asked to take a funky
picture with us because “You are strange and we are strange so…” A very
convincing argument). After that amusing experience, we found some of the other
dancers and G. Ben (who was also performing with us) and they showed us a
chocolate shop on the other side of the piazza where I bought some chocolate
pasta and then we all got gelato (except me—too much sugar).
From there, we decided it was time to go to
the fortress that would lead us our meeting point with Rita. We got a little
confused as to where it was (it was right next to the cool viewing area we
found earlier) and bumped into Alessio (our Italian teacher) on the way, but
eventually we found it and walked down and into the middle of it to the
escalators that would take us down. From there we walked to the bus station
area and found a place to sit down and relax in until we eventually spotted
Rita, Sophie, and Kate. We then walked down some stairs to meet them (I was so
sick of those stairs at that point since, due to some confusion, I had walked
them twice already) and then Rita drove us to her studio.
Once there, we got dress, warmed up, had a
minor freak out when we realized that no one had brought the flash drive with
the music (though Hannah had it on her computer so all turned out fine), did a
run through, waited, and eventually did the performance. It wasn’t our best by
far (some music/sound problems at the beginning really threw us off and kept us
off for most of the show) but it didn’t turn out horribly.
Once we had finished, Rita and some of her
friends were kind enough to drive us to the train station since we wouldn’t
make it there in time for the train if we walked. I got to ride with Rita, her
son, Kate, and Emily P and it was a really fun ride. The roads we drove down
were absolutely stunning and listening to Emily chat with Rita’s son in broken
Italian was hilarious.
Eventually we reached the station, and Rita
checked with the ticket salesman about whether or not we would have train
problems with the strike (luckily the answer turned out to be no, though I know
we all got nervous at the Tarantola station as we came back), and then hugged
us all goodbye. We then all grabbed some snacks at the Tabacchi nearby and
boarded the train. By the time we got back to Arezzo, it was time for dinner,
so Emie and I grabbed a kebab from the shop near the station and then took a
cab back to the villa along with Emily P., and Kate.
And that was my last weekend excursion for
this semester. Crazy eh?
Ciao!
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