When in Bologna and Certaldo

This was quite the weekend! Two day trips and each SO much fun. On Friday me and four of my friends went to Bologna for the day. It's about an hour from Florence so not too abd. We got there around 9:30 and stayed until about 4 45...it was perfect! We probably didn't do nearly as much historical and culture stuff as we had hoped but I think we're going to try and go back there before the end of the semester. We spent a lot of time wandering the streets aimlessly, which is honestly my favorite type of travelling. Bologna is home to the world's oldest university (i believe) and so we walked through the streets in the neighborhood where the university was. It was quite the college town. It was a bit unfortunate because we have to travel with a small budget and going to places like bologna, known for their food, puts a limit on what we can try. We can't afford to have a nice lunch in bologna to try the cuisine so we just ended up having a typical italian meal. Still good obviously.

Today was SO much fun. Amazing. We went to two towns in Tuscany for my sociology class. The first town was called Montelupo. It's known for it's ceramics so we went to the ceramics museum. It was interesting I suppose. The museum was suprisingly nice considering the size of the town but it was pretty plain and boring in terms of it's content. I love pottery but I knew all the stuff that was discussed so it was only so interesting. After the museum we had time for lunch and exploring until our bus left at 3 00 for certaldo.

Certaldo was my heaven. Entry was free (thanks NYU)but then my friends and I bought a nice wine glass for 3 euro in order to have a wine tasting. Basically this little tiny medieval town on a hill was hosting a food festival. There were dozens of stalls set up selling their products and of course, there were tons of samples. Cheese, meat, bread and olive oil, chocolate and wine wine wine. SO much fun. We spent almost three hours wandering around sampling everything. My professor even shared her beer with me! The smells, the tastes, the sights, everything was incredible. You don't taste food like that in the U.S. I tried gorgonzola right from the wheel...with flies all around! It felt so authentic! I tried wine jam (??)and wild boar...maybe it was the wine but I felt progressively more and more fearless when it came to trying all the meats. I definitely had some mystery meats. But all delicious. I just kept thinking to myself how wild it was that I was on a school trip and not on vacation. Only in Italy.

This upcoming week is a bit busy getting ready for midterms and on Friday-Saturday I'm going on another school trip to Padua, Mantua and Verona! A domani!