Our Italian Adventure began on the afternoon of Tuesday, October 14, 2014 in Champaign, Illinois. We confirmed our love for flying out of Champaign with a stress-free flight out to Chicago. At O'Hare, we got our first taste of Europe boarding a flight to Madrid on Iberia Airlines. Rather than an organized line of people like we typically experience in the U.S., everyone just mobbed and cut in front of each other to board. After taking our seats, we were asked a question in Spanish by the flight attendant and both gave her a blank stare. She caught on and said, "Espanol o Inglese?" "Oh, English." Our only previous experiences traveling outside the U.S. were trips to Mexico or the Caribbean, where they assume you speak English just by looking at you. I immediately realized this trip was going to be much different; but in a way that felt exotic and exciting.
We settled in and were impressed with the new, comfortable plane with nice seats, individual touch screen tvs, USB ports, charging outlets, blankets, pillows, and an empty seat next to us in the center aisle. Kelley had explained how the flight would go ahead of time, and as she had explained, we were offered dinner about 60-90 minutes into the flight. We both got funny-sized Coke Zeros to drink. I have to say I was pretty impressed with the quality of the food, and had no complains about my chicken, rice, veggies, roll, and tiramisu cake. I gave my crab salad and really bad coffee to Noah. This coffee flavored water was not at all representative of what we'd find in Europe going forward.
Shortly after dinner, they dimmed the lights and Noah and I settled in to watch Maleficent on our TVs together. After that, it was made pretty clear that it was night time and they expected everyone to be quiet and sleep. Despite my hardest attempts, I just tossed and turned and annoyed Noah in the process. I became irrationally irritated at the kids a few rows back who kept yelling and their parents just kept saying "Shhhhh," but obviously this never helped because they just kept speaking loudly. I started to think to myself "Is the fact that I can't understand what they are saying making this better than it otherwise would be, or worse?" I'm still not sure.
About 90 minutes before landing time, the flight crew decided it was morning! No, I thought. It is not morning. It's the middle of the night and I am exhausted. But, they turned on the lights and served us breakfast, and nobody else felt it was weird to be eating pastries and drinking juice at the equivalent of what was about midnight. After our casual landing, we proceeded through the Madrid airport. Besides the fact that we were forced to walk through a duty-free retail zone that reeked of strong perfume, I found the Madrid airport pleasant and easy to navigate. We boarded our small plane to Bologna and landed a couple of hours later, tired but excited.
Kelley was there to meet us in overcast and drizzly Bologna. Seeing her was exciting, and we chatted all the way back to Correggio, where she and Peter were living for a few months. We made our way up the crazy loft steps with our luggage and had some lunch. We were then "allowed" to take a short nap. It felt amazing to be horizontal.
When we woke up, we ventured out to explore Correggio on foot, and stopped for "the best gelato in town." Gelato shop owner, Fabio, was a friendly, smiling Italian who "spoke terrible English" that was actually very good English. I loved him. He handed out samples and I settled on a dish of tiramisu and some nutty flavor that Keels recommended. Noah had Irish coffee (that Fabio was very proud of) and pistachio. Kelley explained that he made all the gelato and rotated it frequently, with the older flavors on one side of the display and newer ones on the other. Fabio had left his job in finance and opened the gelato shop with his wife. Pete had asked him once about how they were doing, how business was and he replied, "Business is good, and we are happy."
We continued walking around and found humor in the side-of-the-road vending machines with tobacco, candy, and condoms--basically their version of a 24-hour convenience store, which doesn't even come close to existing there. Everything but the restaurants and bars pretty much shut down at 6pm. After our first unsuccessful attempt at finding a "non-baseball cap" hat for Noah, we ventured back to Bellins' apartment, showered, and got ready for dinner.
We got a true Italian experience for dinner at Kelley and Pete's favorite restaurant in town. We walked into the nearly empty restaurant and were greeted by the owner, Marco, who knew Kelley and Pete and that they preferred that he recommend what they should have for dinner. He brought us wine, and bottles of "frizzante" and "naturale" water (sparkling and still). I found I liked the Europe preference for sparkling water, especially since I wasn't able to indulge in the wine. We enjoyed an extremely delicious traditional Italian dinner with cured meats and cheeses and fresh bread, cheesy vegetable risotto that was served out of a huge wheel of parmesan cheese, and porcine mushroom, spinach, and pumpkin tortellini. We all fell just short of licking our plates clean. Despite our full bellies, we couldn't help but take a few tastes from the tray of various small desserts (chocolate, espresso, and fruit cakes and meringue) that Marco brought us. After a warm, welcoming dinner with good conversation and company, we returned to the Bellin apartment and prepared for our early morning trip to Rome.
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