Il secondo. Riot Coming

I could be so much better at this blogging thing if I tried.
This Saturday I’ll have been living in Italia for exactly one month. I can’t really decide if it feels like a lot longer or shorter since I first dragged my suitcase down the cobblestones. But I’m feeling settled in for the year here, especially with the recent addition to my life of a bici. With the narrow old medieval streets it’s impossible to get around any other way, so I’m paying exactly one euro a month to rent this ridiculous ancient orange bike that seems to be working out well so far. I just need to find a basket for the front, like everyone else here has.
And maybe a baby gatto to ride in it.

This weekend I hopped the 20 minute (3.50€) train to Bologna to explore another Italian city for the afternoon. Bologna is definitely a big city coming from Ferrara. And it’s filled with students due to the oldest university in Europe at the city's historic center. I just sounded eerily like Fodors.
Via dell' Indipendenza, the mainish drag in Bologna:

Molly, as touristy as humanly possible, in front of Nettuno (that's neptune) in the Piazza maggiore:

Chiostri! (cloisters):

Oncoming storm (or tempesta, maybe my favorite italian word):

My friend Molly (or Mollita, in italiano) and I walked around the big sabato mercato in Bologna together, very crowded with thousands of people and 10€ pairs of shoes, and then had a pizza pranzo (lunch) with a waiter who couldn’t understand why we were speaking Italian to each other. Later, we found literally the best gelateria on earth, called Gianni. I have a feeling we’ll be returning to Bologna very frequently with the rest of our friends, if only for the ice cream.

As we walked back to the train that afternoon, we saw rows of carabinieri, a type of police officer, lined up with those plastic shields disturbingly recognizable from any movie depiction of a riot. Further up the street, we found the manifestazione, or protest, with thousands of students massed in the street and heard “Fratelli! Sorelle!” (Brothers! Sisters!) and then the word “Sociale!” screamed over and over through a megaphone mounted on a van. It started to pour almost immediately and we basically ran back to the train to avoid the storm and the riot. We still never figured out what they were actually protesting.

The entire rest of my weekend was spent in my kitchen. A group of friends here basically moved in for three days to cook meals and hang out in my apartment. Out of all of our apartments here, the verdict on mine is that it’s the most homey. And this weekend, it was the best place to make mounds of pasta and apple crisp. Figuring out how to light the gas oven was yet another adventure. We’re fairly convinced, or at least I am, that we have an old Italian ghost living in the apartment with us. Her name is Elvyra (it’s handwritten on one of the wooden hangers in my closet), and seems to me to be very kind and really enjoying having so many young voices in her old apartment. She’s also left about 25 ancient tea sets stacked in her cabinets that all open with a variety of medieval-looking keys, and lots of strange and at least four decade-old kitchen utensils and silver picture frames and crackly air mail stationary and yellow newspaper cutouts along with maybe four or five heavy magnifying glasses tucked in the infinite number of cubbie holes in the fold up writing desk. Besides digging through my quirky old apartment, I’ve been making a lot of tiny cups of strong incredible Italian coffee and the occasional nutella and peanut butter panino with the stovetop sandwich grille I found the other day in my kitchen, drinking 2€ bottles of vino with my friends, and getting to know as many Italian students as possible on weekend nights (or more likely mercoledi sera, Wednesday night being the big night to uscire, go out, in Ferrara) when everyone comes down into the various piazze to dance and occasionally watch fireworks over the castello.
My room: My front door, Via Cassoli, 9:
Next weekend I'm headed to France on the cheap Italy-based airline MyAir, (that, don't worry, all of the Italian students have actually heard of and use), for about 30€ each way to see the Feist show and explore Bordeaux with Callie and hopefully eat tons and tons of good French bread and pastry. I've actually started learning French at the university here, from the incredibly adorable Madame Céline Jolly, but I don't know how far my two lessons this week are going to get me... In any case, au revoir.
I'm sure I pronounced that wrong.