Bologna

During the past few months we've spent a good deal of time driving around here and showing the sights to visiting friends and relatives.  The result is that I have been essentially posting the same content over and over again but trying to disguise the fact with interesting photos of Romanian road conditions.  Were you fooled?
It's not as if I was deliberately setting out to make this blog repetitive and boring but you know the saying, "Write what you know" well, heh heh...
But now we're off on a 3-4 week adventure to see sights heretofore unseen.  I won't tell you where exactly because that would spoil the fun and quite possibly ruin whatever chance I might have had for capturing and holding anyone's interest.
We still have Linda in tow and because she's never seen Budapest before, we made yet another tour there.  What can I say?  I love that city and it's right smack in our path whenever we journey westward.  As for the merits of visiting the same place so many times I will quote Linda who said "Budapest far surpassed all of my expectations".  So there.
But I won't bore you with photos of it again.  Photos in the rain no less.  Because yeah, we're traveling in late October and you just never know what you're going to get weather-wise.  But we are not fair-weather travelers so we are unfazed.
So past Budapest, west through Hungary and Austria (once again, territory we've already covered but wait, we're getting to the new stuff) and into Italy!  850 km in one day and this is a testimony to how anxious Mihai is to see this country that he was willing to drive it all in one go.
For the most part it's a lovely (though long) drive but admittedly those out-of-the-car-window shots are never very inspiring and even less so when its raining.  So we didn't take many.  We just sat back and did what normal people should do: watched the landscape rush by and listened to music and ate our apples and salami and the special U.S candy that Linda brought for the boys.  Snug as bugs we were.

At Linda's recommendation we settled on Bologna (seems to me Michael and Lisa used to live here-does my memory fail me?) as the first city on our Italy tour.  We arrived on schedule but discovered that the restaurants (the sit-down type) don't start serving until 7 which left us with time to hop on a very crowded bus and wander through the city looking for a bank.  The leftover Euro we had from Barcelona was too pathetic an amount for pricy Italy.
Even in a cold rain with a hungry belly the historic downtown Bologna is beautiful and luckily not that complicated to figure out since we had very little idea of where we were going or how to get there.  You know that bewildered feeling you get when you first arrive in a new city, darkness and rain notwithstanding.  For the most part I would say that we did a very admirable job of maintaining our good manners and civility even though we were cold, wet, hungry and disoriented, bravo for us.   The toll that the aforementioned circumstances took on us can be seen from the rather pathetic photos we managed to get that night.  Usually Mihai is a champion of night shots but there was something about the combination of the rain and the repeated statements of "let's eat, let's eat, let's eat" that kind of threw a damper on his creativity.  Sorry.
Italians have a habit of closing up their businesses whenever the mood strikes them and normally I am totally in favor of this sort of business practice since I think the American model of "make money at all costs" is destructive and unappealing.  However, when two of the three restaurants your concierge has recommended turn out to be randomly closed for the evening and when it's getting close to eight and you're wet, you know what it does...?  well, actually, what it does is make that third recommended restaurant such a welcome sight that you find everything charming and warm and lovely and delicious and you just want to grab and kiss every darn Italian waiter that pours your wine or hands you another plate of bread.
Or maybe that's just the result of the red wine on a really empty stomach.
The next day things get drier and a little less confusing and the photographs come easy.
So.  Bologna.