Day 8
After a fun but exhausting day in Bologna, we had a program event early Saturday morning. We were hiking in Fiesole in Montececeri park and had to be there by 10am. That's misleading though because getting there meant first waking up, getting ready, eating, walking to the bus stop, and taking a bus for like half an hour. So I actually had to wake up closer to 8. I don't do 8. Unfortunately all my classes are at 9am too so after making it an entire semester without ever seeing 8:00am on a clock, I'm now getting used to it. By "used to it" what I actually mean is I still go to bed at the normal 2 or 3am and just lose a lot of sleep. After a week of maintaining that schedule and learning a new town/language/schedule, I was pretty tired. The hike was a lot harder than I was counting on. But I might have been biased because I've also been sleeping on a cot and my muscles kind of ache. Anyway, the view was nice at the top so I got to take pictures!
I ate lunch before I went because I knew I'd be hungry after hiking and didn't want to pay for 15€ pizza. Well- I was hungry anyway. Everyone was eating around me and the hike used up all my energy. Turns out a personal pizza, if I got the cheapest one, was only 5€- so I got it. I honestly didn't want it but this place was supposed to be really good. It was decent. Then, the bill came.
When people say "the tip is included" what they actually mean is "the optional money that you pay is already included; the fee that you have to pay to sit down and get served is not." In this case, the I want to sit down fee was 2€. Let me put this in perspective: the pizza was 5€. The "tip" (even though no one calls it that) was 2€. That's a 40% "tip". Also I didn't want pizza but the hike was a lot longer and my willpower a lot weaker than I expected. Ok. I can handle that situation. But here, separate checks don't exist. When you eat at a table of people, even in this case when you don't know them (they were on our program but we'd never met them before), you still just get one bill. Which means hopefully you have lots of small bills. Good thing we all only had 50's and 20's. We asked them to break our big bills and they were completely out of change. When everyone finally figured out how to pay their part of the bill (and most of us overpaid by a few cents), we still came up 2€ short. Rather than stand in the entrance arguing about why the bill was so high, I threw in the extra 2 and left. I came in expecting to not pay anything, then I was anticipating 5€, and then somehow left 9€ short. Ugh. I swore to myself I won't be eating out again.
I got back on the bus home in a bad mood. We saw a nun. It was weird because I don't think I've ever seen a nun in real life and definitely not on a city bus. I took a picture.
We stopped by my friends house and found the rest of our friends/roommates booking spring break, so we sat down and didn't end up leaving until night time. I learned that booking travel arrangements is my idea of hell. Especially because I booked last and got more expensive tickets and then the site wouldn't even accept my debit card. My mood was even worse than leaving Fiesole. At least I will definitely be going to Venice, Spain, and Morocco!!!
We were out of food so we stopped by the 'Nad (My roommate is trying to make that happen- the local supermarket is actually called Conad) and good news: I decided to man up and just buy the only thing that resembled face wash in all of Italy, even though it was over 6€. I tried it out and- worth it. I also decided to give up on eating less sugar while I'm here (I lasted a whole week on my quest- yay) and bought the biggest jar of Nutella they had. This is my roommates fault for eating Nutella and cookies every night and making it look so good. To make myself feel better about the sugar coma I was about to enjoy, I also had some tortellini before making a huge dent in my .90€ bag of "Frollini" (shortbread). 
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