Bologna

Hilary and I left Cinque Terre early in the morning on Monday and went to Bologna where my friend Catherine is studying. It was great to see her. When we first got there we went to her dorm, where we got to check email! I can't believe how hard it is to go just two days without email. Catherine has such a different experience from us in Aix. Since she lives in a dorm setting instead of apartments she gets to meet a lot of Italians very easily. It was so nice to see them all getting along and joking around. I think two other things play into this as well. One, Catherine is a very out going, friendly person and makes loads of friends wherever she goes. Two, I think Italians may be easier to get to know then the French in general.

So after we had finished checking email and resting for a brief moment, Catherine showed us around some of the city. We visited the park where she goes running (I went running today!) and then she took us to a fabulous gelato shop (see picture below). After that we went into the Basilica in the center of town and looked at the Neptune fountain that is there as well.
That evening we went to get aperitifs with a lot of people from Catherine's program. It is such a great deal. You just have to buy one drink and then you can help yourself to as much of the apertif food buffet as you want. They had great mini pizzas, salad, cheese, olives, salami etc.

The next day Catherine had class so Hilary and I wandered around the city. We found excellent hot chocolate. It is very different in Italy. Almost like chocolate pudding (American pudding). We also climbed to the top of one of the Bologna towers where the views were very pretty. That burned off the calories from the hot chocolate : ) We met up with Catherine for lunch and had delicious pizza. At the end of our meal Catherine struck up a conversation with the guy at the cash register and we ended up staying another 20 minutes and having a free liqueur...it was an interesting experience.

That night we bought groceries at a market and cooked dinner for ourselves at Catherine's dorm. It was yummy. We then finished the night with a trip to Grom. Grom is a gelato shop and it is amazing. Hilary told me about them. Apparently there are two in NYC. We went to the one in Paris and I fell in love. Our goal is to go to one in every country we visit. I don't even know if there are Groms in any other countries. I just went to their website and there is a Grom in Paris, NYC, and the rest are in Italy.