Bologna

Ahhh, breakfast with actual cool milk for the muesli. I really relaxed in the morning, didn't check out until the 11h00 limit, visited one more mosaic basilica, and then headed to the train station. It is so much nicer when the locals can speak some English, and it does seem to help when I try to speak some Italian at the start, as if they appreciate the effort.

Had lunch during th 30-minute wait for the train. Chowed down on a sandwich while watching Pope Benedict on TV giving a mass in Turkey. Had a set of 4 seats to myself for the 90-minute train trip, and WOW were there a lot of flat huge vineyards. It was almost as vast as Saskatchewan wheat fields; well not quite that big, but it seemed like the same mentality, just grow a lot of grapes, row upon row, on the flatland.

Bologne is actually crazy. To me it is the city of minimotorcycles (motor scooters) and the city of lots of bad graffiti. The roads have no lanes, no pedestrian lights (there are painted stripes where pedestrians are just supposed to "venture forth" with faith in God or something), and if there isn't a raised sidewalk separated from the road by Roman columns, then people walk on the road, with confidence that the cars, bikes, and motor scooters will go around them and each other. The old churches are hard to spot and hard to get into, if they are open at all, with all the "newer" 19th- century buildings built very close to them.

This train station actually had a tourist info booth with info on hotels, like in Austria and unlike the smaller Italian towns I'd visited. I wasn't sure that they would actually book a room for me, like in Austria, and besides I liked my Ravenna experience where I could actually walk by a hotel to see if I liked it or not. Well, my luck with overcast skies was running out, and the first raindrops fell while I was outside the 4-star Royal Hotel Carlton. I meekly walked up to the posh Honolulu-style counter in my orange Alps weathercoat, jeans and University of Regina sweat top, and asked the price. 160 Euros, so maybe 240 Canadian bucks. Yes, I said, my last night in Italy deserves some luxury. Well gosh, the room has very nice furniture and a wide-flatscreen TV, and the lobby is really beautiful, like the CPR hotels in Canada but cleaner and prettier.

I only got 2 hours of touring. I did find their big Dom, or basilica. This one in Bologne is older than the ones in Austria, and it breaks the record that I've seen for the highest ceiling. Wow is this basilica big. That ceiling is higher than some cloud formations. In fact, maybe clouds could form up there. Two Goodyear blimps might fit inside, one on top of the other. The front doors are proportionately insanely high, maybe 8 bodylengths high (and permanently shut).

Back to the hotel for a bubble bath before dinner. This 19h30 dinnertime in Italy really requires patience. I thought about the hotel restaurant, but the poshness of the lobby and the waiter in a tux intimidated me, so I wound up spending 31 Euros having a two-course dinner plus wine and dessert, in a popular pizzeria. As I was "solo", they sat me facing a television like the other solo guys. So I had a rather nice Italian dinner while watching Porky Pig and Tom and Jerry. These were OLD cartoons, and boy were they funny!!!

That put me in a good mood, so with the hotel lobby quiet at 9pm, I got my camera and took a few pictures of their gorgeous lobby. I even got one of me behind the front counter by myself, as if I ran the place, to the amusement of the two valets.

Again, it really helped that everyone I talked to in Bologna spoke English. The city traffic is nuts, though, and there is far too much graffiti here.