By: Elizabeth
On our second day in Bologna guess what we did? It’s pretty obvious if you read the prior blog post. We ate. One of my favorite things to do when arriving in a new city is to book a tour. It really gives us a chance to walk around the area and orient ourselves with an experienced guide. Often times the guide will share their secret haunts and stories about the history and architecture.
Our tour was a walking foodie tour to various shops and restaurants to learn more about the food of Bologna— aside from bologna! We saw how labor intensive it is to make tortellini stuffed with beef and sausage. We learned that the bigger tortelloni are traditionally stuffed with spinach and ricotta. We tried all the different ways Parma is cured along side of delicious Parmesan Reggiano and then tasted the traditional pasta bolognese. Our tastes were paired with the traditional wines of the Emilia Romagna region. Afterwards we did a progressive tasting of aged Balsamic Vinegars (oldest one we tasted had been aged 25 years) that was quite impressive in their dense fruit, herby complexity, woodsy notes and chocolate undertones (ha, ha, just wondering if you are paying attention). To end our tour we stopped and had two scoops of? You guessed it, gelato! I had a scoop of super dense chocolate and coconut while Michael had café chip. Yummy!
The following day took us on a short flight to Mallorca, Spain for our long-time friends’ son’s wedding. I noticed I needed to transition from my broken Italian to my broken Spanish, neither of which is pretty but we got by. I am so in awe of Europeans that speak several languages fluently! The wedding was absolutely beautiful, magical really! It was great to see friends and socialize and speak English in complete sentences. This is one incidence where the pictures really tell a better story than what I could possibly describe in words!
There we ate some more!
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