Oh hello. It's Lynn this time. We've been in Bologna for a week now, and though this is a gastronomic capital in Italy, I thought I would make note of some non-food related details.

I'm not sure how much people have used airbnb, but we have been using it almost entirely on this trip, and it has been great to get to know local people. In Bologna, we are staying with a man called Fulvio, who rents two of his three bedrooms to visitors (we are apparently staying in his old son's room, with spiderman books piled on the bookshelf and some kind of martial arts certificate on the wall). He has been very kind, spending time in broken english telling us the top things to see in the city, and offering to help Matt in his quest for an education in pasta. The third room has been empty for most of the week, though for one night a young mother and her son visited from London. Fulvio escorted us all to a restaurant down the street, ordered for us and then left (a bit unexpectedly)... but on our return to the apartment, he gave us some of his freshly baked bread (yum) and liberally shared his bottle of grappa (yech!). Now the bedroom has been reoccupied by a younger Polish guy who seems very nice, and has offered to take us to his favourite trattoria sometime soon.

Most of our time has been occupied by 3 things - eating, walking around the city (between meals) and recuperating back at the apartment. I think the one thing we did pay money for was to take a trip up one of the two medieval towers found in the center of town, for a view over the city. One is shorter and leaning over quite a bit, while the other is twice as high and leaning only slightly. We went up the less leaning one, which involved walking up old wood steps that wrapped around the inside of the tower, up and up. A key to this experience was not looking down, which was harder on the way back down. I don't think Matt felt as daunted as I did, since while I tentatively took it step by step, he plowed his way down with little vaults at the end of each flight.

Now to be lazy I'll just finish with a few things we like about Bologna:

-the food
-the medieval streets and porticoes
-the drivers on the road here seem competent (no observations of hollering/gesturing between cars or ignoring traffic signals)
-there are tons of dogs here and we have seen at LEAST one wiener dog per day
-this is a food topic again but we were also happy to find out that Bologna is known for gelato particularly, so we have been quite willing to sample different ones daily

That's it for now. Today we had a food factory tour complete with a "light lunch" (10 full courses) which Matt will probably post about... but for now we have food hangovers.