No pics of the train station; no pics of the trundle from there to our apartment. It was about a kilometer, which is not far to walk (.62 miles), but when laden with luggage (and being careful of the longevity of wheeled bags, and therefore wanting to carry same over paving stones, rather than risk damage to those wheels), well -- no pics of the trip to the apartment.
Waiting a few minutes for our landlord, outside our apartment door in Bologna.
Looking east on our street.
Pink bicycle, and teeny car, visible in the previous.
I walked up to that next street, and looked south.
Flowering cherries all up and down this street!
Looking north.
I talked a few days ago about recycling containers, and about people doing their own sorting, and their own delivering-of-sorted-materials-to the-proper-public-receptacle. Here you see a group of such receptacles. There was a group like this on our block of our street, too.
The landlord arrived and let us in, and gave us one (1) set of keys. (We had two sets in Venice.)
Kitchen, with bathroom door, and that's the source of our heat and hot water, upper right corner.
Note windows open to courtyard. The other side of the courtyard is really close, with windows looking right in our windows.
Bathroom. This apartment was decorated and furnished with a more modern sensibility than the last. Lots of red/white/black.
Our landlord took that pic of the model in the red dress, on the carousel near the Eiffel Tower. We wondered if the black/red/white was to complement the photo, or the other way around. Maybe she just likes that color scheme........
Note closed shutters, to keep out the neighbors' eyes....
They are external shutters. We had to open the window to close the shutters. We had closed our Venetian shutters every night, and opened them in the mornings, opening and closing the windows to do so. We expected to do that here, only to find that we COULD NOT close the window after opening it. We tried and tried, but something was bent or out of place or something. We could see where it was sticking, but couldn't do anything that would let it close.
We called the landlord about the window, before we went out on the first day, and it was closed when we got back. With no instructions as to how to close it. We decided to just leave the kitchen shutters closed, as there was no other way to not be observed by neighbors when in the kitchen...............
I was glad to have brought along this footwear. They insulated my feet from cold marble, and cold tile, in many different places.
Many many Nutella jars, in different sizes, in this apartment. This spoon isn't the best thing for scale, because you can't tell that it is a little spoon. These jars say they contain 30 grams -- one ounce is 28.34 grams. So these are tiny things. I coveted one, thinking it would make an excellent Christmas-tree ornament, but I resisted and left all five of these that were in our Bolognese kitchen right there.
Nutella jars, with corn flakes (?), cornmeal, rice. This apartment was better equipped with food than either of the others. Flour, sugar, a mostly-used bottle of vodka in the freezer..... There was a bunch of other stuff in the freezer, too.
Here's what the living room looked like when we moved in. Sofabed taking up the whole space. There was a curtain for this window, so we could be less exposed without having to close the shutters in here.
I tried the sofabed one night, but it was lumpy and uneven, as sofabeds often are. I decided it was better to have to come downstairs in the middle of the night to use the bathroom than to try to sleep on lumps and bumps.
Backing up toward the doorway into the living room, on another day. Pic lightened so you can see the staircase up to the loft. It was really rather dark in this apartment.
Like this. Dark. Fold-out couch, folded back up.
Same pic, lightened.
Here's what we could see out the window. I won't call it a view. If you stood pretty near the window, you could see a little patch of sky.
Having climbed the spiral staircase, we can see the king-size bed up there. It was much more comfortable than the sofa bed. It only had a lamp at one side of the bed.
Standing in the same place as the prev., looking down. Note netbook, plugged in to a socket from which I had removed a lamp's plug. It was an issue, finding sockets in this apartment....... There was nowhere to put a drink, if you were sitting on the couch, but the floor, or the staircase.....
We've come back downstairs, and have a good view of our drying rack. It was good to have the sofabed folded up, so we had space to put the drying rack.
Here's the other side of the kitchen, with a pic which will appear, not so lightened, in a later post. You can see the stove (the only one we had which had electronic ignition), the sink, and the place where you'd have put a dish-drying rack, if you had one. There was one which was part of the cupboard above it, but -- like a lot of stuff in this apartment -- it didn't seem all that clean.... (At least the sheets and towels seemed to be clean.....)
We used the colander as a drying rack for small stuff, and dried the plates after we washed them.
I was sure that our Bologna apartment wasn't going to match our extremely nice Venice apartment, but ... this one was a disappointment. I would not stay here again.
It was reasonably convenient to the train station, but was a mile from all the things we wanted to see and do in the heart of the city. I don't really want to expend my energy walking a mile back and forth, to and from the places I want to be. I want to spend it seeing and doing the things I want to see and do.
The walls were thin, and we could hear the neighbors, if they were vaccuuming, or having a party. There was construction overhead, on weekday mornings.
This wasn't a terrible place, but it wasn't good enough that I would stay here again.
In order to facilitate chronological traversal of these posts, here is a link to the next post.
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