Bologna

Last Thursday was what Peter likes to call a "work day", meaning he doesn't take attendance. Clearly we took this opportunity to go out of town. A little background info on this one. Apparently Italy has some sort of new person in charge of the public schools, Alessandro called her the new Minister? Anyways, she is cutting funds and other great stuff that everyone hates so there has been major protesting going on here for the past few weeks. Well, we didn't get the memo about Thursday being the official protest day and Bologna is a college town. So we rolled off the bus and straight into a huge protest, it was amazing. If I could have figured out what they were chanting I would have been right in there with them. It was so insane that we totally lost each other for abouts 30 minutes. My favorite signs were pictures of the new 'Minister' dressed as a witch or with a Pinocchio nose.Bologna was awesome. We kind of bailed on the whole museum thing this time, I was feeling a little museumed out. We did some major window shopping, which brings me to a great tangent. I never understood what window shopping was about...is anyone ever satisfied by just looking at a window display? If you are in Italy, yes. They change their window displays like every week and they are just awesome in general. Oh, and they have the prices listed in the window so you really can shop. Normally this just deters us from going inside, but at least it keeps us from entering stores that are way out of our league.
We went into the original University building. The walls were covered in crests for the professors. For some reason I felt like I should be in Dead Poet's Society. The sweetest room was the anatomy room. There was a huge marble slab in the middle of the room for the body and these statues of men without skin...totally sweet.We also climbed the tallest tower in Bologna. Surprise, surprise. There is something to climb in almost every city here, but it does result in awesome views. This tower was the sketchiest thing I've climbed thus far. The steps were maybe three inches deep, good thing I have small feet.The highlight of Bologna was the food. This is where tortellini was invented, as well as Ragu sauce. Clearly I got tortelloni (big tortellinis) with Ragu sauce...delicious. Our waiter also said that we spoke fantastic Italian!!! but our egos were soon crushed during our fiasco of the day:
After lunch we were walking through town and stumbled upon the wallet of a young Italian named Alessio. We were right in front of a Tabacchi so we decided to turn it in there. Anna gave it a whirl. After getting tangled in some ridiculous grouping of words the old Tabacchi man thought Anna wanted to buy cigarettes for young Alessio. I decided it was time to step in. I decided to incorporate charades, since Italians use their hands a lot they are pretty good at this game. Sure enough after acting out walking down the street and picking the wallet up off the ground Tabacchi man figured it out. The best part of this is that I definitely know how to say things like...I found this on the street, or Someone lost this...but I'm not sure that any of those words came out of my mouth.