Delays and Porticos

At last I have arrived at my destination! I endured a series of delays and setbacks, but I made it! The first was a 2 hr, 25 min delay in my flight from Boston Logan to London Heathrow airport. The reason was because I was flying into THIS mess:

Britain was experiencing the worst snowstorm in 50 years, and of course it was the day I wanted to fly through London. I passed the time in Logan by eating with my family, moping around for a while, calling people, and struggling to find internet. Finally I got on the plane and flew over the Atlantic. British Airways, it turns out, is a great airline with fantastic customer service, and the flight attendants were really nice. British people are also generally really funny to be around, so I was entertained, and the plane was comfortable.

Next setback was in Heathrow, where it took 1.5 hours for my luggage to show up on the belt. With a total of 4 hours of delays, I had no more hope of catching my connecting flight out of Gatwick, London's other airport, which was a 50 minute bus ride away. Luckily, the British Airways people were extremely helpful and they got me on a flight at 19:20 (Europeans usually use military time). So I got on the next bus to Gatwick and wandered around/slept like a hobo in the airport for the rest of the day until my flight.

At the gate, I was suddenly surrounded by Italian people, and as far as I could see, I was the only non-Italian on the plane with the exception of the (still funny) British flight attendants. There is an obvious absence of tourists in Bologna, which is quite different from most other Italian cities which are practically overrun with them.

I took a taxi from the airport and arrived at my apartment at about midnight. My housemate Thomas (who is Italian even though he has an English name) and his 3 friends were hanging out in the kitchen, so they fed me and we talked about things like movies and politics in Italian for a while.

I will make many more updates about the city of Bologna, but for now, I just want to show you the defining characteristic of the city in my opinion: i portici. Over 40 km of portici (porticos, or arcades) line the streets of Bologna, so that every sidewalk is underneath these massive colonnades and arches of varying elaborateness. Two examples are shown below. It's therefore possible to walk through the entire city while it's pouring rain, without an umbrella, and remain almost completely dry. All of the restaurants and shops are under the portici.

Why does Bologna have 40 km of porticos, you might ask? Well, apparently there was a major housing crunch in the 1200s as the University brought more people and commerce into the medieval city, so the Bolognesi began to expand the upper floors of their houses and buildings laterally outwards towards the street, supporting them with wooden beams. The government of the city saw that this was structurally unsound, so they made laws regarding the construction of portices. Eventually, they realized that they could tax this, so they started to require that the buildings all have porticos. And thus Bologna is the most porticoed city in the world, and when you walk its streets you get the unique feeling that you are walking through an elaborate medieval maze.