What A Bunch of Bologna

Day: 229

Towns / Cities Visited: 145

Countries Visited: 27

Steps Taken Today: 13,840

Steps Taken Around the World: 3,759,118

We rose to what we would soon discover is a public holiday in Italy. Having read in multiple places that parking in the centre of Bologna was nigh on impossible, we opted to take advantage of public transport; however, a rudimentary online search the previous night had offered little information about how to go about such an endeavour. In fact, if nothing else, we learnt that the public transport websites of this region were likely built in the early 90’s and had simply been left alone since then: hard to navigate and incredibly outdated. Still, my partner managed to find what looked to be a bus route in. Despite sounding like tickets could be bought on board, we stepped on to discover that the outer suburb buses do not, only the inner-city ones do. We would, of course, have bought a ticket at a nearby retailer, but, as I said, it was a public holiday, and everything was shut this far out of town. Our bus driver spoke zero English, but we hand gestured through understanding he’d let us on and, as the bus trundled off, a kind fellow passenger translated the rest to us. He would take us to the first stop of the inner buses onto which we could change, buy tickets on board, and complete our trip that way. A kindness we were grateful for given that the next bus wasn’t for another hour and a half and we had a booking to make.