Bologna: Free Pasta for All!

We're here!

It's so fun to finally get to see all the things we've been reading about for the past few months!

It was a very long travel day and we both are feeling the result of sitting in airplanes too long. Greg's back hurts and neither of us can focus for more than a minute without nodding off. Of course, I didn't sleep much. Note to EJ: Counting backwards from 100 does NOT work for me. But we only had one SNAFU and that was in Munich when United Airlines and Luthansia didn't seem to communicate and we couldn't get a boarding pass for our final leg to Bologna. (We love United, don't we, JK & CS?) It all worked out and we arrived in Bologna about 1:30 pm, grabbed a taxi and came to our apartment.

The apartment is cozy and immaculate, and the owner of the apartment is delightful. She must have known it was Greg's birthday! She had made Panna Cotta for us - our favorite Italian dessert. We've already sampled it several times. I'm thinking it would make a good breakfast, right?

So let's get right into first impressions of Bologna. This is the first time we've been here. It is a busy, bustling, city. Some call it gritty with all the graffiti everywhere, and it does have that kind of urban feel to it. It's obvious it's a university town as there are lots of young people hanging around the squares and in the bars. You really have to pay attention as you walk since there are bikers, buses, scooters, and walkers all trying to get through the same streets. It doesn't seem that there are many tourists here. Unlike Florence or Venice where you see flocks of tourists in the main areas, here there are very few. Instead we saw kids being walked home from school and people coming home from work. It's a real Italian city with people going about their daily lives. I love it!

OK, the food. Several articles I had read about Bologna described it as a food-lovers city. Some said it has the best food in Italy which is saying a lot. Certainly the people of Bologna love their food. There are markets and specialty food shops everywhere! (HW, I keep thinking how you would be in heaven here!) I'm sure there will be many food pictures posted here in the next week. Here's a few I took at an indoor market, Mercado delle Erbe and some shops.

Anyone know what these are? Some kind of cauliflower?

Couldn't really capture the color of these. Beautiful!

Apricot tarts. Yes, please.

After settling into our apartment, we bought some fruit and yogurt and headed into the center of town. The main square in town, Piazza Maggiore was filled with people enjoying the afternoon. Did I mention it was sunny and about 60 degrees?

I ducked into the Tourist Office to get a map, but I think my phone app will be what I'll use most of the time. (CityMaps2Go - awesome!) We wandered through some of the old outdoor market area until Greg's back told him he needed to sit down and have wine. So we stopped at the first little place that had an open table in a little alleyway, 051. The guy sitting next to us was served a beautiful plate with meats and cheeses. That looked like something we needed so we ordered that along with our wine.

A word about mortadella. Bologna is known for it's mortadella, and I always assumed it was just like our baloney. I've had mortadella in the States (with you, SE, I believe) and was always a bit disgusted by those white fat globs. Coming here, I envisioned quietly removing them from the meat leaving a pile of fat circles on my plate.  But they serve it sliced paper thin in Bologna, and it is very delicate and delicious! That was just one of the selections we had along with salami and prosciutto and cheeses. Fabulous!

To make things even better, our waitress appeared with a large plate of tortellini with ragu, and she indicated it was an extra they had made by mistake. Would we like it? For free? Well, gee, I guess!! So our glass of wine turned into dinner. The pasta was amazing - light and tender - and the meat sauce was excellent. I had read that here they use little if any tomatoes in their sauce but it is very flavorful.

This picture is for you, NW. Wish you were here.

By now it was only about 5:00 local time and it was still too early to go to bed even though we were exhausted. We walked to a wine shop I'd heard of and bought a few bottles to bring back to the apartment. Then decided we needed our first gelato, and after finding two gelateria closed, we finally found one open. The gelato was ok (I think we'll have better here) but the flavor that was the best was peanut and nutello. The most interesting one was gorgonzola! I asked for a sample, and it did have a subtle flavor of a sweet gorgonzola.

One of the questions people asked us before we came was if we thought people here would ask us about our president. The answer is 3.5 hours. It took only that long for the first person to bring him up. We met a lovely British couple who were having wine in a shop, and they heard me speak and asked where I was from. As soon as I answered, he said "So how's Donald Trump? Are you here because you are fleeing your country?" I don't want to turn this into a political blog, but I will say that two things interested me. First was how knowledgeable and current they were about our country's political environment. I guess the world really is watching us. The second was when he said firmly, "The people of Britain do not like Donald Trump. We fear for your country." I'll just leave it at that and move on.

Tomorrow we will explore Bologna and hopefully get some better pictures.