Day 30 - Bologna...and then off to Rome.

The two towers
see all photos »

We woke up in Bologna to a simple, yet much-needed breakfast. The tea and toast got us energized for the long trekking that we would do on this day. We walked down to the train station and dropped off our heavy backpacks.

We walked to and along Strata (Via) San Donato and through the famous gates. This was all a little more interesting to us because our fraternity from University (Kappa Sigma) was founded in this city and at this school. We walked through the University of Bologna and found the 2 famous towers, Torre Degli Asinelli and Torre Garisendi. We took the sketchy wooden stairs to the top and tagged our names in permanent marker around the top. We  had been told that there were tons of names everywhere but it seemed they had just painted over everything so ours were the first to make the mark. On the way down we discovered another area that had been preserved and there were inscriptions from many years back - very cool to see.

The top, where we tagged our names.
see all photos »

We then walked to Via Sargozza and to what was another monument in the (Twelfth) Gate. The city itself was interesting because there was a major street going around the entire city in a pentagon shape and all the little streets in the middle. Apparantly there used to be a stream or river of some sort that had since dried up and things have since been built over it.

Absolutely famished from all the walking, we found some food and grabbed the train to Rome.

We got to our hostel around 8:30pm and settled in. We went to a local italian restaurant for dinner, got changed, and headed out for what supposed to be a famous pub crawl ("Homer's Pub Crawl")

The view
see all photos »

It was different in that we all met in a plaza with a big statue, it was probably famous or something but that wasn't one of our concerns. We chugged as much beer as possible, playing a couple drinking games and tried stomaching as much of the cheap vodka as possible. We headed out on the walking pub crawl meeting a group of 34 girls on exchange along the way.

The final bar was really small and were fortunate to find people who knew their way back to our hostel. After going to some of Europe's largest and most exciting clubs, these small bars didn't prove to be too exciting. It had been a long day and we quickly passed out.