Sunday, February 13, 2011

Bologna Part 2

This past weekend I gave Bologna another shot. The first time I went with Chelsea, about two weeks ago, was one mishap after another. This weekend however, things were looking up. The weather was beautiful, there was no art festival to mess up our plans, and a lot of kids from school were going. Nick, Chris, Micheal, Danny and Jeremy went late Friday night after class but Peter and I decided not to spend the night and so we met up with them just on Saturday.

Pete and I got to Bologna around 3pm and decided to take a look around and found a few sights we wanted to see. First on my list was the tower. Now what this tower is, or what its called, or when it was built I don't know, but this thing was hiiiggh. Its the tallest building in Bologna and so I definitely wanted to climb that sucker. We got to the top right around sunset and it was gorgeous, you could see the whole city lit up in orange and red.

The rest of the afternoon we spent people watching and drinking wine outside of a little cafe in the center of town. I kept telling Pete to keep his eyes open for our friends and sure enough who did we see about twenty minutes later? Michael with his bright shiney green European style Geox jacket and Chris in his slick blue sweater and button down. One Italian, one American, both actually Americans from Jersey. We hung out with them for a while, it was right in between siesta and dinner time so we killed a couple hours watching the Scotland Vs. Wales rugby game at an Irish pub in town. Once we all had a little buz going we went our separate ways, Michael and Chris to go fetch their lazier comrades at their hotel, and Pete and I went in search of the perfect bolognese meal. After walking aimlessly for nearly 40 minutes we happened upon this gem of a restaurant called "Il Doge". Not much from the outside but this place was massive once you got in, and completely full of Italians happily munching away at a huge variety of dishes. The first thing Pete noticed was the portions, perfectly large. This kid is big on portion size. Chelsea and Pasquale didn't make it into Bologna until well after 8, too late to catch dinner with us.

Anyways, this meal was epic. We started off with l'insalata caprese, the tomatoes were fresh and the buffalo mozzarella was bananas! Next was the main event, lasagna bolognese. The first time in bologna this had been my biggest let down, not this time. This lasagna was gooey, rich, and had the perfect amount of crunchy cheese hardened to the top layer from the broiler. Bellissimo!
Believe it or not we continued on our culinary quest and next ate half a pizza each, and dessert. We were so full by the time it was all said and done, definitely suffering from food comas and ready to head home and hit the sack.

Bologna has definitely redeemed itself. I didn't want to leave, but I have a feeling I will be back soon.

Sunday is always a lazy day in Colorno, everything is closed, and everyone just chills. It's pretty much the same as the States except there's no football and no delivery Chinese food so basically, it sucks. I went to the grocery store early enough that they hadn't closed and so I stocked up on essentials for the next week or so. After that I met up with Peter and Tony, our resident rockstar and went to hang with some of the Italian sous chefs at ALMA House 1. They all work at ALMA and switch off helping our head chef Bruno each day, sometimes we have Davide, sometimes we have Luca, and sometimes we have this little 18-year-old kid Giovanni. They're all very nice boys and seem to really like us Americans. The best part is they're all around our age, Davide for example is the one we all know the best, we started the program with him as our sous chef so he's the original, and he's only 26. They all go to the pub and hang out and drink beers with all of us, they don't seem to take their role as educator too seriously. Davide also has a friend, one that's worth mentioning simply because he strikes an uncanny resemblance to the worlds favorite vampire, Edward Cullen. This kid is a dead ringer for Robert Pattinson and, not saying I think Robert Patinson is that attractive but its unbelievable how much he looks like him. His name is Tomaso and get this, his real last name is Sanguedolce. For all those who do not speak Italian that means his last name translates to "sweet blood".
No I am not making this up. For all my friends who are diehard twighlight fans, feel free to swoon, pictures to follow.

We were all chilling at Luca's apartment, I suddenly became very aware of how different Italian boys are to American boys. For example, we went over and Luca's friend had made fresh focaccia that morning and put out two different kinds of cheese and three different types of prosciutti. All the Italian kids were dressed to perfection as if they had somewhere very fancy to be going. Us Americans in our hoodies and jeans looked extremely slobby, I felt underdressed. They also fit about six men onto one small couch that in America would have fit two, maybe three guys. They just sandwiched themselves in there and had no problem being extremely close with one another. It was cute. Anways we went back home as the Italians made their way to Parma to get out of Colorno for the day.

Now Sunday is coming to a close and its time to head to bed, Italian class at 8am tomorrow and I'm exhausted.

Buona Notte

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