Oh, Bologna

After about two years of anticipation, I am finally in Bologna. Okay, that makes it sound a lot more dramatic than it is, but still. It's exciting.

We got to Bologna on Wednesday afternoon, and were brought to our respective dorms. There are three student residences to which we were randomly assigned. I'm living in Poeti, the actual dorm building (the other two are apartment-style housing) where we all live in double rooms with Italian roommates. Luckily, Poeti is right in the middle of the city, and about a block away from our program's office where all of our MAIL arrives! And also where some of our classes are held. Some of our roommates have already arrived, but most won't get here until the end of September, when the University of Bologna classes start. My roommate apparently lived in our room last year, since she has pictures on the wall and some things in the bathroom. (Bonus: we all have private bathrooms in our dorm rooms.) But since she's not here yet, I live in a constant state of nervous anticipation. It's nice to have the room to myself for now (although it's a very oddly shaped room, more like a hallway, it's very long and narrow and the window looks out onto some huge building machinery, maybe heating or water pipes...but at least there isn't noise from the street) but it's strange because I'm still expecting someone who will share the room with me. Hopefully we'll get along well, and be able to understand each other!

From what I've seen so far, Bologna looks like a great place to live. It's a city of about 400,000, in addition to about 100,000 university students. We're still finding our way around, finding the best places to buy groceries and kitchen supplies (since we cook most of our meals in a communal kitchen) but we've been finding everything pretty easily so far. As far as the communal kitchen goes, it seems nice enough, and there are wooden lockers next to the kitchen where we can store pots and pans, etc. We also have mini fridges in our rooms. Unfortunately, my locker doesn't lock, so I've decided to just keep the non-valuable cooking supplies in there and hope that nobody steals it. Also unfortunately, Nicole, who also lives in Poeti, has a locker that locks but is extremely shallow because it's in front of a pillar, so we can't actually store anything there.

Bologna is very beautiful, particularly because there are so many porticos. Almost every street has a portico. Which is convenient, because apparently it rains a lot here in the fall. Luckily, it seems to be one of those European cities that is gorgeous even on the most depressing rainy day. The art and architecture is truly beautiful!

The worst part of the last four days has been my inability to reunite with my beloved laptop...which is currently being held hostage in customs in the Bologna Airport due to miscommunication and errors written on the mailing form. (I'm using a public computer right now.) Hopefully I'll receive it sometime this week. I hope it's soon, too, because in order to get wireless set up in the dorm, we need to fill out a form and write in the IP address of our computers, and once that's handed in, it'll take 15 days to get internet. At least there's a lot of free internet in the city that I'll be able to take advantage of once the computer gets here.

But on a more positive note, we had some of the best gelato EVER yesterday, at Gelateria Gianni. I thought it was good in Postiano, but this Pistacchio gelato was far superb. Do gelaterias remain open in the winter in Italy? We'll certainly find out. On a not-so-unrelated note, Nicole and I are going to try to go for a run through a park tomorrow morning. We're hoping that we can find a nice route and have enough endurance after our past few weeks of eating European food to go jogging on a regular basis.

More about Bologna and my classes later...the public computer logged me off with no notice, and subsequently deleted a bit of this post, so now I'm using Nicole's laptop to finish up this post. It will be a happy day when I see my lovely laptop again!

P.S. If you'd like to send me a letter/postcard/hug and kiss in the mail, my address is:
My Name

c/o Programma ECCO 

Via Val d'Aposa, 7 

40123, Bologna 

Italia