Stop Three: Bologna

Bologna was probably my least favorite stop so far. It was a lot less tourist friendly than I had heard, and it was freezing cold. We stayed in a hotel though, and it was nice to have our own room and bathroom. But the hotel was in a sketchier part of town and was pretty far away from the center of town. After watchings She's the Man in Italian (with me dubbing everything), we made the trek down to the city center, checking out the gobs and gobs of shopping there was! So I guess it is a good place to shop rather than tour! We got to the main piazza where most of the sights were, and the medieval town. We roamed around a bit, exploring random alleyways and shops, while taking pictures of the churches, towers, and other old buildings. My day was made though when we found a cafe that had vin brûlée (aka HOT WINE!) Yum! So we stopped and had some and it was delicious. Then we checked out a place that my friend had wanted to try for dinner (that had gluten free options for her) but we discovered that it didn't open until 7:30, which we found was common for most of the restaurants in the town. So we wandered around some more and tried to find a way to kill almost three hours. It was hard, and it didn't help that it was really cold outside. We ended up siting in a McDonald's (which were everywhere there, which was strange) and entertaining ourselves with our iPods. Finally it was time for dinner, and we headed over to the restaurant. We stopped at a neat bookstore along the way that had three levels, with a restaurant on each floor. By then we were hungry and we went to dinner. We walked into the restaurant, noticing it was pretty fancy. The waiters all had on nice clothes, and they asked if we had a reservation. They took our coats before seating us and handing us menus. But the menus had no prices... Which is never a good sign. Randomly one of our menus had the prices listed, and we all about had heart attacks! Of course by this time we had already been served water and some biscuits (that we didn't touch). We didn't know what to do! Luckily we were the first and only people in the restaurant, so when the waiter disappeared, we put some coins on the table and made a run for it. As we were grabbing out coats and rushing out, we could hear our waiter calling behind us "What's wrong? What's wrong?" So laughing and feeling quite embarrassed we rushed out of the restaurant. What an adrenaline rush! We couldn't believe what we had just done! It was quite a memorable experience. We decided to go back to the bookstore and just eat at one of the restaurants there. The food there was still good and I finally had some moscato d'Asti! So with that we made the journey back to our hotel to hang out and rejuvenate. We got up early the next morning to make sure we got to the train station on time for our train to Venice. We got there with time to spare, and hung out at a cafe for a while. Then we went to find out train and said goodbye to my friend Chelsey, who was flying back to London as leaving us. Our train to Venice was late and we ended up standby around for quite a bit. But then we boarded and were on our way to Venice!