Sat, 27 Sep 2003

author Tim	location the 10:34 Innsbruck to München Inter-City train
posted 10:42 CEST 30/09/2003	section Europe2002/Europe/Italia ( all photos )

Around Bologna ( 20 photos )
We got up and ate the included breakfast at the hostel - again a nice touch at this HI hostel.
Slowly limping and all the while cursing my near-useless knees, we walked over to the bus stop. Today the drivers seemed to be more happy, and a bus turned up soon after. At the far end of the ride, we found ourselves near some markets. We slowly had a look around at all the things available, pondering the fact that no matter where you are in the world, the same Chinese-made odds and ends can be purchased at the local markets. There was quite a lot of the market stalls on two sides of the road, and we spent a while just wandering around the place.
We had no set plans for the city, as none of the major attractions were free enough to warrant our attention. In the central square Piazza del Nettuno, we first had a look at the interesting fountain of Neptune. However, it wasn't long before a better sampling of Italian culture made itself known to us with some loud growly sounds - a judging event of the Italian Ferrari Owners Club.
All manner of old and new Ferraris were on display, with the owners' level of care varying from extreme to fanatical. Most were being pushed into place rather than driven, and all of them seemed to have arrived on a truck. Feather-dusters and plenty of polish were all being used to clean them up for judging. There must have been about fifty there, ranging from 1948 through to 2003.
Liz's enthusiasm for boys and their toys didn't quite match mine, so we set off to explore a bit more of the town. Bologna is apparently famous for lots of red buildings, but to be honest you wouldn't have really known it just from looking. Pretty for sure, and as Italian towns go it had a good vibe to it. We wandered fairly aimlessly, looking for places to sit, making some phone calls, ducking in and out of back alley-ways, getting lost and then finding ourselves again.
Not far up the road we found Piazza di Porta Ravegna, where there had originally been forty-two towers. In the great tradition of Italian buildings, they had all developed horrible leans. Now only two remain, and we took the photo which we wanted to get in Pisa but weren't allowed - Liz pushing one of the towers back up.
We bought a loaf of bread and found ourselves back in Piazza del Nettuno, sitting in the seats which had presumably been set up for people to watch the final judging of the cars on the podium with ramps in the middle of the square to eat it.
Liz sat for a while while I ran around taking some photos of the cars, keeping us both happy. After a trip to an internet café where we booked two nights in a hostel in München/Munich (very lucky to get them as it is Oktoberfest after all), we decided to go to the train station to find out about train tickets to there via Verona and Innsbruck to continue our trip. This turned out to be quite a task.
I went to the automatic ticket machine while Liz waited in the human queue, the result of which was that we could easily get trains to Verona, but for international travel we needed to go to ticket window 17. We waited in a queue for quite a while only to learn that it wasn't infact the queue for window 17 - that was a separate queue.
So, into the next queue, which was very very slow progress. There was one person running it, capable only of extreme slow progress, looking everything up in books. There was a British guy in front of us we got chatting to who was putting his car on a train to Belgium, but this took the best part of forty five minutes to explain and pay for.
We weren't expecting much when our turn came to explain our multi-part journey, but in the end a combination of English, Italian and what we had written on a piece of paper got the explanation across fairly quickly. It was organising the tickets which took an eternity. He had to look the fares up in books and then write out manual tickets. Fair enough, it must be quite difficult to book tickets across international borders, but I would have thought they could have organised a more efficient system after so many years of the trains running.
Once again in a chatty relaxed mood, we spent the evening in a cheap recommended restaurant Trattoria da Danio, where we ate a fixed price menu which was great value. Of course, we just had to try the Spaghetti Bolognaise in Bologna, which turned out to be quite different to what we had expected - far less tomato-ey, but very full of flavour.
We had intended to get a bus back to the other bus stop where the bus leaves for the hostel, but our knees and backs and everything else which is wearing out seemed to be much better after sitting down for a while. When we got back to where the bus left for the hostel, it turned out that we had missed it for the day, no more were running!
Instead we got on another bus which went about 1km away from the hostel, and through a combination of Liz's excellent directional memory and a hint from the bus driver, we found our way back after a twenty minute walk or so in the dark.
We just made it back before the 11pm lock-out, and slept soundly in our twin room.

(customised)