I brought the lasagna

Hey gang, so Italy happened. However, there were a few hatchets thrown into our plans, hence writing this blog post much sooner than expected. However, I'll get to those later. Overall, it was very fun, and rather struggle-full on the account of the fact that many Italians speak very little of any other language than Italian. 

Thursday Night and Friday Morning: The Journey

The journey commenced on Thursday night. Our plan looked something like this: Tübingen to Horb to Zürich to Chiasso to Milan to Bologna, which took a grand total of 16 hours and involved staying in the Chiasso train station for roughly 5 hours waiting for our very early train to Milan. The first few connections went off without a hitch, and we got to Chiasso around 1AM. So we waited in the the absolutely freezing train station for five hours. I was very not prepared for such cold, so there was very little sleeping done. But I did get to read Harry Potter auf Deutsch. 

In our attempt to find our train once 5:30 AM actually rolled around, we met two guys from California who were studying at Pepperdine's remote campus in the french-speaking part of Switzerland and were going in our same direction–albeit with the final destination of Venice to party it up for Carnevale. They told us of their plan to get to Milano Centrale–much easier than Hannah's and mine. There was one problem, however. Their plan involved switching trains at an intermediary stop and the train (a very janky thing that was straight out of the 1970s) didn't announce stops. So we got out a stop early and had to freeze in some random Italian train station again, but luckily, there was another train coming in time to take us to the next station before the Milano Centrale train got there. 

Everything else went pretty well. We got to Bologna by 10AM (2 hours later than Hannah expected–she thought we were taking a fast train), but the 3 hour train ride from Milan to Bologna gave us a little time to get some sleep. 

Friday: Bologna
Hannah's family friend, Denise, met us at the train station to take back to her apartment, where would be staying with her, her husband, and her four small children. So it was quite the full house. It took us about 30 minutes to walk there. Which was absolutely lovely except for the whole being a turtle thing. We dropped our stuff off at her place, changed, and then went out again to do a little bit of exploring with her. 

Denise first took us to a large and beautiful church and monastery with all sorts of rooms and a very pretty courtyard. The entire time there were monks chanting (or there was a recording of monks chanting) so that was simultaneously cool and eerie. After that we walked past Bologna's leaning tower (questionable Italian engineering and architecture is not limited to Pisa) and then wandered through the town looking for a restaurant that Denise liked. She also tried to show us the Bologna canal, but alas, they had drained it. We finally found the restaurant after some google mapping, and it was absolutely delicious. I got tortellini covered in bolognese sauce, and it was quite delicious. 


The rest of the afternoon consisted of napping and then being awoken by rowdy children, but that wasn't too bad. Hannah and I watched Oz the Great and Powerful with them until around 7, when we decided to hit up The Girl with the Pearl Earring exhibit that was going on a little ways from their apartment. Denise said that Bologna was the only stop in Europe on the thing's tour, which seems a little strange, but whatever. Everyone was quite excited. The painting itself is cool, but underwhelming if only because it seems so small. The rest of the exhibit was a bunch of still lifes (which are not particularly interesting to me) and a few other more interesting works. 

We got home in time to babysit for Denise and her husband, as they wanted to go out to Valentines Day dinner. So the rest of Friday night was watching Star Wars Episode X with their kids and then heading to bed. 

Saturday: Venezia

We got up pretty early to head to Venice. The train ride was almost two hours long, and we wanted to make sure we had enough time to explore the city. We got there around 11AM and (after talking to a sassy Italian man about where to find a map) managed to walk straight into a protest of some sort (we believe it was something about education costs). Whilst still near the train station, we bought Carnevale (the Italian name for Mardi Gras–albeit the Italian version lasts much longer and might even be crazier) masks and then proceeded to make our way through the snaking streets of Venice. The map was not entirely useful, as the main transportation roads of Venice are the canals (I literally didn't see one car while I was there) and the streets are kind of just for funsies and those poor souls that don't have boats.

We ended up wandering through some very small alleys, going into random churches, and eventually found a lovely little restaurant where we ate four-cheese gnocchi for lunch and chatted with our waitress in German. Afterwards, we continued walking and eventually (after much and great struggle) found our way to the Basilica Cattedrale Patriarcale di San Marco (otherwise known as Saint Mark's Basilica–the most famous Venetian cathedral with beautiful Byzantine architecture right along the Adriatic), the line for which was very long due to the mass amount of tourists in Venice for Carnevale. Despite this, we ended up getting inside in relatively short order.

The Grand Canal

Afterwards. we wandered along the coastline with all the other tourists for a while, and went back to a slightly (very very slightly) less-touristy spot to take a gondola ride. Since it was 100€ to take a boat regardless of whether you have 2 or 6 people in the boat, we teamed up with 2 Turkish women and a couple from England to cut the costs. And the ride was very, very cool. Our gondola driver (is he a driver?) spoke a little English so he told us a few things about the city and the architecture, before dropping us off where we started. From their Hannah and I made our way to towards the train station in order to get back to Bologna in time for apertivos. 

Now, somewhere along the line, some Italian said: I have a grand idea. Let's let people order a glass of wine and then get as many free appetizers as they want! And to that, I say, amen brother.

Sunday: Firenze

Duomo

On Sunday, the train was a little bit less early, because the only options were fast trains that we had to pay a little bit more for. So we got to Florence in a little over a half and hour after riding on a really swanky train (it's quite strange the very large discrepancy between Italian trains). We got to Florence around 10AM and commenced the wandering. We accidentally stumbled into the tourist information office, which had been moved from its logical location into the Cattedrale Santa Maria Novella, which, while close to the train station, doesn't make any sense. After getting a map, we happened upon a chocolate festival in the plaza of said cathedral (dangerous business) and then made our way towards the Galleria Uffizi, which houses a metric fuckton of paintings. Unfortunately, I have no pictures of it for you guys because the Italians are very serious about not taking pictures in museums. So we wandered through there for more than two hours (and got to see Botticelli's Birth of Venus...oh found out that the painting in our bathroom is a famous Botticelli painting, Madonna of the Magnificent, and no one in our family had any idea, lolerskates.) 

We then walked to the other side of the center to see the David, which was incredibly cool (and much, much bigger than I expected) but alas no pictures allowed their either. (I tried to very sneakily take one with my phone and an Italian woman yelled at me...eyes like hawks those guys.) And whilst waiting in line, we met a nice young American couple from California that recommended to us a sandwich place that was right near the Galleria Uffizi. So after seeing the David, we went down back that way to have the best sandwiches ever. Oh my God. So good. Oh and they had 2€ unlimited self-serve wine, because Italy is wonderful. (All'Antico Vinaio, Via del Neri 65, for any one that wants to have the best street food ever.) 

Then Hannah was nice enough to indulge my nonsense and take a picture of me "touching the butt" of the David replica statue that's in the Palazza Vecchio. Afterwards, we went to both the Duomo and the Cattedrale di Santa Maria Novella, which are both incredibly beautiful. 

Duomo Ceiling

We then wandered over to the other side of the Arno River for a quick look see, got Fanta Lemon from a Snack Bar, and got to the train station to make reservations for the train back to Bologna. And that was when Hannah found out that her wallet was missing.  

Late Sunday and Monday: The Holiday from Hell
Thus commenced the remainder of our trip. Otherwise known as the Holiday from Hell (a reference to Come Fly With Me, in case you missed that). We ran around Florence for a little while looking for it, but it was gone. The next few hours were a flurry of canceling credit and debit cards, figuring out how to cancel German debit cards, figuring out how to lock German residency permits. Then the next morning was a series of getting shuffled from Italian police station to Italian police station until one would give Hannah a police report because Italians aren't very good with bureaucracy. So I guess this is as good of time as any for a Mad-Eye Moody-style PSA: CONSTANT VIGILANCE!

We then took a 1:30PM train homeward, but due to a 14 minute delay from Milan to Zürich, we missed our train from Zürich to Horb, which added another 4 hours onto to our trip, as we went from Zürich to Basel to Karlsruhe to Stuttgart and then to Tübingen. We also thought that we were going to have to spend the night in the Stuttgart Hauptbahnhof, because our train from Karlsruhe to Stuttgart was 10 minutes late. So when we saw that the Tübingen train was still there, we ran like mad women (and the Germans definitely laughed at us). Let me tell you, I don't know if I have ever been happier than I was to be on that train home. And so we got home around 2AM. 

So yeah, that was our trip. A bit of a mess, but the beginning was very fun. So with that, I shall leave you guys. Bis später, dudes.