Weekend with the fam and enchilada night

The plan was for Mom to text me around 11:30 on Friday (March 5th) when she got to the Bologna airport. 11:30 came and went. Class finished around one, and I still hadn’t heard from her. I went to lunch, thinking the plane was delayed, and still hadn’t heard anything even after grabbing dessert. At this point, I realized her cell phone probably wasn’t working so I tried the hotel but they still hadn’t arrived. I was lucky at the train station though! I pulled up on my bike and saw them waving from inside. I couldn’t hear it from outside, but Abbey said mom whistled so loud when she saw me that everyone in the station looked at them. After some really long welcome hugs, we walked to the hotel. They settled in a little bit and then I showed them around Ferrara and went to my host family’s store. It was cute seeing them all meet one another, not speaking each other’s language, but saying exactly the same thing to one another. I went to my house for dinner, packed my things, and spent the night in the hotel.
The next morning we got up and took a train to Rome. Rome! It’s huge. Seriously gargantuan. Possibly the biggest city I’ve been to, including in the US. (Or at least it felt that way—so many people, so much to do, so much to see) Our hotel was pretty close to the Colosseum, near the center of Rome. We got the suite room with the balcony which you could see the Colosseum from. After settling in, we went to the Trevi Fountain, which was PACKED even though it’s not even tourist season. I don’t even want to think of what it looks like come June and July. The weather was a little on the chilly side, but I was thankful for the sun and lack of precipitation. At the fountain, we all threw our pennies over our shoulders and took pictures. We grabbed lunch on the way to the Spanish steps and ate there. I had expected them to be better, or for the piazza to be bigger, but it was pretty low-key. After lunch, we took the metro to the Vatican and went through the Vatican Museum. We were really just interested in seeing the Sistine Chapel, but you had to go through all of these halls before you could get there. It was actually really neat though going through halls of roman statues, Renaissance paintings, tapestries, really old maps, and gorgeous ceilings. The Sistine Chapel seemed like just another room as part of the exhibit, but with a lot more people sitting to soak it in. I was completely in awe—to have every surface of a room painted in that manner was just absolutely stupefying. The guy knew what he was doing. (Unlike some of the works of art in the next rooms of contemporary art—just kidding!) We saw the Pope’s gardens then headed over to St. Peters. The whole square was crowded with members of the servizio civile who wear bright yellow uniforms. Based on my interpretation of what one of them told me when I asked why there were so many of them, they had been invited by the Pope because of all of their hard work in Abruzzo last year after the earthquake. Cool.
We watched the sun set over the Basilica then got gelato before dinner :) We passed by the Spanish steps (ok) and Trevi Fountain (really cool) in the dark and then went to dinner. After dinner and dropping stuff off in the hotel, we went to the colosseum to take night pictures and we tried some jumping ones, too. We also checked out the Vittorio emmanuele monument and the Forums across the street from Palatine Hill. Then it was bedtime.
The next morning I tried to get a shower. Tried is the key word here. There was a switch on the outside of the shower, two handles with different functions, two shower heads and 6 jets. I could figure out how to get the correct shower head to work, but the water never got hot. I washed my hair and then it got cold all of a sudden, so that was the end of that. After breakfast, we headed to the Pantheon but it closed soon after we got there. We took pictures in the piazza in front of it then went to Palatine Hill. That place is larger than life. There were so many parts of it to see so we didn’t see everything but we did check out Constantine’s Basilica, The Roman forum, Titus’ Arch, a big villa, and a stadium (and a couple other places but we didn’t know what they were). Next we went to the Colosseum and saw where they kept the animals underground and flooded the arena for ship battles. The arena in Verona had more of an “I can imagine myself watching gladiators fight to the death here” feel, probably because at the colosseum there were no seats left. After that we had lunch and went back to the Pantheon. The dome was so giant I couldn’t take a picture of the whole thing. It is amazingly well preserved for being so old and the marble and paintings were so elaborate and beautiful. We did some shopping around after that then took the train back to Ferrara. We met a really cute Italian guy from Rome on the train and he gave me his email address…I’ll try facebook stalking first :) Overall Rome was a really cool experience because it was like a bunch of world coming together in one place—so many people from so many different places of different ages, classes, languages; so many periods of history; different religions represented, it was truly global.
On Monday (Women’s Day!) I took my Translation midterm then headed to Venice. Adam and the guys from Spisani gave all of us women “mimosa” the traditional flowers for women’s day. Mine spent the day in my bag, so when I got back I decided to press them instead of put them in water. Mom, Abbey and I had planned to meet at 2:30 in Venice, but by the time I got out of my test and to the train station, the next train wouldn’t arrive until 3:00. I took that one and found out when I got there that Abbey and Mom had also just gotten there and had figured I would be late as well. We met at the Frari church and went inside it to see some Donatello sculpture, Titian paintings, and this big old pyramid. There were a lot of people buried inside the church too under the floors. Kinda weird. After that we went to Rialto and took pictures from the bridge, then headed to San Marco’s square. The cathedral looked nice in the daylight, but we didn’t go inside. We walked around for awhile and kept stopping in places because it was cold and we needed to thaw out. We stopped in this church that was being used as a music museum and saw a bunch of different violins, violas, and stringed instruments I don’t know the names of. We decided to make our way back to the train station and have dinner on the way. We stopped at a place along the water and watched the wind blow stuff over outside. Dinner was pretty long and it was good because we didn’t really want to go back outside. But eventually we did, made it back to the station, and were no stuck there till 6am. Thank goodness!
On Tuesday, I went to class and then met mom and Abbey for lunch. Abbey had cappellacci and mom and I had piadinas. We spent our “day in Ferrara” inside the hotel, taking a brief excursion to K2 for gelato then coming back to nap. It was just so miserable and cold outside I wouldn’t have wanted to spend the day any other way. Around 6 we went out and got flowers for my host mom then met them at their shop and they took us to the house. Clara had made maccheroni with vodka sauce, lasagna al forno, the chicken-prosciutto-cheese wrap things, and baked tomatoes. AND for dessert, an apple cake! Mmmmm :) It was a good dinner together—Clara told a story about closing the cat in a dresser drawer earlier in the day and I didn’t need to translate much because of all of her gesturing. She kept making this face like Tata did, completely petrified, and holding her arms stiff out in front of her. Paolo spilled water everywhere and blamed it on Teresa. Ale was being his usual brotherly self and talked about how the frizzante water helps with digestion and makes you fart. Clara was so appalled, but everyone else thought it was pretty funny. After dinner, I brought down my computer and put on skype so that Mom and Abbey could say “hi” and so Dad and Kelly could see Clara, Paolo, and Teresa. After that I went back to the hotel with Mom and Abbey and spent the night. They had to leave really early in the morning to catch the train to Bologna to make their 7am flight. We had a teary good-bye, but not as bad as it would have been if I had been more awake. I heard from Dad the next day that they had gotten into Paris at 5pm because their flight had been delayed 8 hours. We had checked the night before, but there was nothing on the website about a delay for their flight. Ugh travelling can suck sometimes.
On Wednesday we had enchilada night at the apartments. Sam makes a really good enchilada, and we made spicy salsa and beans and rice to go with it. It was just good as Clara’s cooking, and that’s saying a lot. I can’t see her trying to make Mexican food though. We drank a little at the apartments, and then some of us tried to go out dancing, but the discoteca Bolognese was dead. So we went to the 1euro shot bar instead. It was really good to practice my Italian with real Italians for a change, and one guy (who was actually French) asked me at first if I was Italian! Yay, I’m getting better! There were a lot of French guys that night…most of them really creepy and wouldn’t leave poor Teresa alone. We went back to the apartments after the bar closed and tried to help figure out sleeping arrangements for those who weren’t fit to drive or bike home. I thought Teresa had left her bike at home and took the bus and so we would be walking back, but her bike was at the apartments. Unfortunately, she had been extra cautious and used Andrea’s lock in addition to her own and didn’t have the key for that lock. So we had to walk after all. At the beginning I was feeling ambitious and thought Teresa and I could take turns running while the other biked slowly. She tried, but her headache was too bad to I tried. I thought it was ok at first, but the enchiladas and 1 euro shots didn’t agree. So we walked. And got home at 3:30am. Sigh. The next morning I woke up at 10:40 and therefore missed my 11am class. (Which of course, is my favorite one) I thought about pulling a Raff and going in late, but I hadn’t done the homework and was seriously in need of a shower after having smoke blown all over me the night before, so I just went in for the 4om class and had lunch a casa.
I decided not to go to Switzerland this weekend so I could catch up on stuff (like this!) and study for my history midterm on Monday. They had to leave at 6:30 am to avoid the all-day Italia-wide transportation strike, so I’m pretty glad I didn’t have to do that. I made plans instead to go to the art gallery and pick our project subjects with Micheal, but when we got there it was closed because of the strike (a lot of people commute here from Bologna or Venice). So we just had lunch and then I shopped a bit. I just got the 1st Lord of the Rings book in Italian and also a purse I saw when mom was here that I liked a lot. Tomorrow I’m finally meeting with Yasemine to do some language practice, and maybe Sunday I’ll go travel somewhere. Possibly Padova, Ravenna, or San Marino. Who knows!?