The Bologna Blog: "Singin' in the Rain!"

Bologna gets a lot of rain. One good thing is that it's normally not snow (although this winter was the "worst" in fifty years or something). Another good thing is that most of the city is protected by the porticoes, making the job easy for your umbrella, unless of course you leave said umbrella in your Dramaturgy of Music classroom...not mentioning any names...

Any way, what I'm getting at is that it rained a lot when my friend Mike came to visit me last weekend. However, we really made the best of it and had, as Mike put it, a very "Italian" weekend. (He's in the Rome JCU program where they take most of their classes in English, so Bologna was quite a change for him.)

Friday night we strolled down via Zamboni until we arrived at l'Irish, or the Cluricaune. Every city needs a pub or two, and it just so happens that the Irish ones are the best! Then, with the addition of Rodolfo and his friend Tote, we set off to find the music. Serena had told me about this group of guys that gets together every weekend to play classic rock songs, Aerosmith, Pink Floyd, you get the picture. Well, they meet in this guy's basement in via Broccaindosso, and have been for the past thirty years or so. When I asked for the number of the house, Serena just told me to "follow the music." And we did, and we found the band: Doc Bartocchi's. The basement was filled with youths and bookshelves and a sign that said "E' vietato fumare l'erba qui." I'll let you look that one up.

On Saturday we explored Parma, home not only to Parmesan cheese, but also prosciutto. Can you guess what we ate for lunch? Parma is a really cute little town, all the buildings painted pastel tones and cobblestone streets. We tried to get lost, but it turns out that we were not successful, inadvertently finding ourselves after a few minutes.

Another thing we found in Parma was a puppet museum. We decided it was worth the 1,50 EUR entrance fee as this was probably the last puppet museum we're going to see for a while. It contained hundreds of marionettes of devils and queens and sailors and everyone else. The last room had modern puppets, including a flock of singing flowers!

We barely made it onto the train coming back to Bologna, jumping through the already closing doors. It was pretty epic, and saved us a half-an-hour wait for the next train. That night, after delicious Bolognese cuisine, we headed over to Tiffany's to watch a bit of the Olympics.

Sunday lived up to its name and was sunny, giving me the perfect opportunity to play tour guide and show off my city before I saw Mike off on the train.