Oh right...I have a blog...

Spring flew by. I feel like I say that more and more about time in general as I get older. It's almost as if time and space are both distorted with age. I was recalling one of my first memories this week, of seeing 101 Dalmatians in the theater when I was about 4 years old. Several years later I had recurring nightmares of being in a gigantic dark room with a bright rectangle at the end, with huge walls rising up all around me, and a terrifying woman screaming at me from inside the rectangle. One day it clicked - it wasn't a nightmare, it was a memory. As a 4 year old going to the cinema for the first time I must have been completely overwhelmed by the size of the room, the aisles, the chairs, and the darkness aside from the huge screen. Add to that the blurring of reality and fantasy for young children and it is easy to see why Cruella seemed like such a real threat.
My point is, these days the cinema feels small and Cruella is just a (scary) cartoon. Just as the cinema has diminished, so has time. Back then movies seemed to go on for ages, and so did the days of the week and months of the year and so on. I kept waiting to be an adult. Now suddenly I look around and I am an adult, and time is whizzing by. It's not a bad thing, but it's my long-winded excuse for not updating this blog in months! 
So, as with the winter, I'll jump back in time and take a few days or weeks to add posts about what I was doing (it was a great season!) and to share photos of the experiences.
...
In my last post I described the snow storm that hit when I was in Bologna, and I didn't have a chance to upload pictures then, so here are a few.

Ready to go for a ride?

This sign made me laugh :)

These were bike racks...

Bologna has some of the coolest graffiti I've ever seen, and is often political.

Took a day trip to Florence. Unlike the time I visited in 2005, this time I could actually SEE the Duomo without a mass of people  in front of it - and the same was true of the streets under my feet and every other sight I saw. 

Back in Bologna, some ice I wouldn't stand under! I imagined that they'd make great pretend swords or light-sabers...

The oddest thing is that I returned to Bologna in May and nature again was up to tricks, because something like 3-6 earthquakes (terremoti) hit in the week that I was visiting. Luckily no one I knew was hurt or affected, but it was devastating for the Emilia-Romagna region as well as Italy as a whole. My heart goes out to the victims and their families.
...
So look forward to more posts coming soon to fill in all the blanks between February and July! A preview of what's to come: France and Austria in February, Prague in March and April, Greece and Italy in May, and Prague in June and July. Stay tuned! :)