Bolzano, Italy

Okay everyone, almost all caught up. We are still lazing around in Milan, but we did get some cool shots of the the duomo this morning, probably a short post about that to come.

We took the train from Munich to Bolzano late in the morning, grabbing a croissant and a cup of coffee while we were trying to get tickets from a strangely inefficient German ticket system. For lunch, we ended up eating about 4 crackers each. By the time we got into our hotel, we were starving, but sadly had missed the italian lunch time by about an hour. Nothing much was open except for gelato and coffee shops. We ended up finding a pizza place that was open a little early and were quite excited.This masterpiece was the Tirol Pizza at a super cute little pizzeria in town. It's toppings reflected the dual German/Italian culture of this area - Speck and wurst. It was delicious since a) we were starving b) it tasted very much like a bacon and hot dog pizza, in the best way possible. c) we'd been starving ourselves of italian food for about a month prior to the trip and were going through serious withdrawal from tomatoes and cheese.
We walked around through the Piazza Erbe, a little street filled up with a produce market along the sidewalk and shops and restaurants along the edges. Everything from flowers to the makings of a magical trail mix of every possible dried fruit and nut to flowers and fresh veggies was available. I'd never seen a blooming artichoke before - this one was probably about 8 inches across. We wandered around for a little bit (sans camera, sadly) and checked out the wide park along the river on the edge of the old town, had a glass of wine or two, and went to bed with big plans for the morning.

First priority of the day was to go see Ötzi the Ice Man at the South Tyrol Museum of Archeology. Click the link to read about him if you haven't ever seen the show on the Discovery channel or National Geographic, and if you ever go to Bolzano definitely check out this museum. The display was really detailed and interesting, and they have other mummies from all over the world there ranging from Egypt to South America to Asia. And the whole thing only takes about an hour to go through, which is good for people like us with short museum attention spans.

After the museum, we went back to the market from some trail mix, then fixed ourselves a nice little picnic and took a cable car up into the mountains.

Up, and up, and up. With some very warm German tourists. It was warm. That's all I'm saying.
But the view was totally worth it and it was only E3.50 each round trip!

You could see a little twisty road winding up and up the mountain, through the farms and vinyards, every time you thought it was at the end, you'd go up a little higher and there would be yet another house or farm nestled into the mountain side.

When we were finally at the top (about 10 - 15 minutes) we walked another 25 minutes or so along one of the hiking trails and found a good spot to eat our feast of pasta salad, salami, bresaola, and cheese - and wine, of course. We ate until we were stuffed and couldn't take the bees anymore and then finished our wine walking back to ride back down the mountain and sitting in a little park near the middle of town.