Waterworld and the best pasta ever!

OK, people - the travel rush has officially begun!  We are only a few days into our busy travel schedule I am getting pooped already!  Last weekend we went to Venice and Bologna.  Venice is world-famous for being that Italian city you see in all the movies where everybody travels by boats (called gondolas) instead of cars.  In fact, the main "streets" - if you can call them that - are all water!  Instead of hailing a cab, you call a gondolier (the guy who rows the boat) and he will take you around the city in one of these:

The city of Venice is actually made up of a few islands.  We stayed on the main island during our trip since we were only there for a couple days.  There was still plenty to see!  The picture below is of the Grand Canal, which is the main waterway through Venice.  If you look closely you can see some really old buildings in there!

For its relatively small size, Venice has an extremely large number of churches - somewhere around 150 buildings!  Most of these have survived hundreds of years of war, weather and water damage (the city floods on a daily basis).  Here are some pictures of a few of the churches we saw.

We left Venice on Sunday afternoon for Bologna - the home of Italian food!  Among other things, Bologna is well known for their fresh pasta.  They make all kinds of pasta throughout Italy, but Bologna specializes in tortellini, lasagne, pappardelle and tagliatelle shapes (you can Google these pastas to see what each one looks like).  With all these different pasta choices available, we just had to give them a try!  We went to a family-owned restaurant close to our hotel on Sunday night.  Let me tell you, they sure weren't kidding when they said that Bologna has the best food in Italy!  (I'm not even sure who "they" are, but "they" sure do know a thing or two about delicious food).  We had tagliatelle with Bolognese sauce (Bolognese sauce, named after the city itself, is a meat sauce similar to spaghetti sauce), tortellini stuffed with cheese and assorted cured meats.  Everything was incredible!  I actually managed to get a picture of some of this food before we ate it up.  Here we are in the main piazza with our assorted cured meats and cheeses.

Bologna is also a really old city with plenty of old buildings (some over 800 years old!).  We climbed an old tower called Assinelli which was built around 1100!  From the top of the tower we could see the entire city.  You can tell that we were up really high because we were looking down on the other towers.

I had to stop for a photo shoot after that tough 320 foot climb - even though I hitched a ride with the camera equipment all 497 steps up to the top (Becky even counted all the stairs)!

Here is a picture of Becky and her mom climbing the stairs to the top.

All this talking about climbing towers and eating way too much good food is wearing me out!  I think I'll call it a night and get packed for our next trip - to Rome!  So until our next adventure, this is Flat Stanley saying, "Ciao amici!"