A Sunny Day in Bologna

Finally. Finally.

Last month was too long. It was too cold, too dark, too sad. It was too much of a lot of things, actually, and I was so relieved when that blessed day finally arrived... February 1. Goodbye January, ya big jerk!

It's a little ironic that I was so happy about that day, because Feb 1 is my brother's birthday. He would have been thirty years old, and I would have given him so much crap for it (lots of gray hair jokes, and the phrase "old fart" definitely would have been frequently used I wanted to bake his favorite cake, black forest, but since I couldn't find cherry pie filling (a key ingredient), I settled for brownies. I burned them, and they actually tasted more like burned chocolate cake then burned brownies, but it's the thought that counts, right? Brownies don't really exist here so I think the spirits of Italy burned my brownies to prove a point or something - it couldn't possibly have anything to do with the fact that I'm a terrible baker. Actually, I managed to salvage them by scraping off the burned parts and covering them with sugar in order to hide the damage.
Yes, more pictures of food. As always...

Anyway, even with the start of a fresh month and a fresh semester, I was still feeling a little down. I've been doing yoga, getting lots of sleep, taking care of myself, but the dreary weather must be contagious. When I woke up this morning though, I was shocked, shocked to see sunlight coming through the cracks in my window... I didn't believe it at first but when I opened the window I saw something that I haven't seen in weeks. A blue sky. So blue, brilliantly, perfectly, happily blue.

It was just what I needed. Such a simple thing, sunshine, and I missed it so much.

Walking around Bologna was so different today than it has been in the past few weeks. People weren't hurrying to get out of the rain, they weren't cold and wet or grumpy. Piazza Maggiore was filled with people and I ran into a lot of my friends on the street. People were riding their bikes again, and going for walks just because they felt like it. Here's the one picture I managed to snap before my camera battery died!
I walked more today than I've walked in the past month... of course that could also be because I had 3 classes on opposite sides of the city, with a 2 hour break in between each class.

Ah yes, classes started on Monday. So far I'm taking Psycholinguistics, Sociolinguistics, and History of the Italian Language. I may or may not take another class, it depends on how I feel. A few interesting classes start in March, including Italian Dialectology and History of Italian Cinema... but I think I'd rather travel the world. Again, we'll see.

Speaking of traveling the world, I'm leaving for Spain in the morning. A few weeks ago, my friend Susan (of the infamous food festival weekend) said "ya know, I think we should travel more"... so 10 seconds later, we booked tickets to Granada. We're flying in tomorrow morning and coming back from Barcelona on the 11th, so we have 6 days to make our way across Spain. We found couch-surfing in Granada but after that we're going wherever we feel like going. Should be wonderful. I get back to Bologna on the 11th and will have about 18 hours here before I leave again for Holland on the 12th... it'll be quite an adventure.

I have so many travel plans on the horizon... after Spain and Holland, the next trip is on March
9 - to Stockholm. I literally paid 5 euro (round-trip) for the ticket. Europe is amaaazing. My sister is coming on March 26 and staying for 17 whole days... I plan on showing her everything in Italy. Everything. She leaves on the April 12th and then Harry's spring break begins - we're planning a trip to Morocco. It makes my head spin, in a good way! Other places I'd love to go include Berlin and Moscow but I'm already dizzy so I'll give it a while before I start planning those trips...

Well friends, loyal readers (Melissa), I love you all very very much but my train leaves early in the morning and I'm stanca morta. Goodnight, all!