first adventure on our own- Bologna

This was our first weekend going on a trip by ourselves, and to sum it up it was extremely successful! We took a train from Santa Maria Novella in Florence to Bologna, which on the way there took us only 40 minutes. There are 3 grades of trains, the Eurostar (fast), the Intercity (medium), and the Regional (slow) speed. We took the Eurostar on the way there and we took the Intercity coming back, which only took an hour. Our group of 8 successfully made it through the train station without getting robbed, success! It wasn't nearly as crowded or chaotic as I thought it was going to be, but we were definitely better being safe than sorry.
As soon as you get off the train in Bologna the main street leads you to Via dell'Indipendenzia, which is shopping CENTRAL. That road had basically every store you could imagine, clothing, shoe, makeup, food, and then right off that main road was the HUGE market which has bargains on shoes, scarves, bags... aka the hotspot. Many of us found boots for cheap, I got grey leather boots for only 40 euros....success! We then continued down the road and went into basically every store, since the sale season in Italy is only in January and July so why not! We passed by one store that had Longchamps in the window, my eyes opened wide and I made the decision for all of us to dash inside. I got an all purple Longchamp for only 45 Euros, such a steal!

After tiring ourselves out from all the shopping we headed to the center of the city at the end of the road and saw the town hall and the cathedral which was being renovated at the time. We traveled down a side street and got to the chocolate shop that the grad student directed us to, which was the fanciest candy store I've ever entered. I actually resisted to purchase any chocolate but everything looked amazing!

We finished our day trip relaxing for a few hours at a cafe where we enjoyed some cappuccinos and then  had aperitivo for dinner at a wine bar. Aperitivo is amazing and I think we need to start it up in the states, basically you pay for an alcoholic drink and then the bar provides food for free. You can go up as many times as you want, so it's basically their version of a buffet. We had it again tonight back in Florence in the Piazza di Santo Spirito which is right by our school and it was even better than the night before. Once again, success!

Onto a new week of classes and such...this week we are starting our regular schedule of Italian so we don't have to go to class every morning like we did for the first two weeks, score. Enjoy your football games you lovely Americans :)

Ciaoooo!

Ps. Random sidenote: If anyone is planning on studying abroad here, the homestays are freezing...make sure you bring a sweatshirt and slippers!