Capodanno 2010

For the Capodanno (that's New Year in Italian, literally 'head of the year'), one of my friends from class invited me to go with him and his friends for a few days to a house up in the Apenine mountains just outside of Bologna. There were about 16 of us there at any given time, with some coming and going over the course of the weekend. It was freezing cold, but luckily there was no snow. The little village (and I emphasize little) was about 30 minutes from Bologna, and the scenery was spectacular; not just the natural scenery of the Apenines, with its lush green hills and valleys, and banks of clouds lazily making their way through - but also the incredible little village where the house was located. They were mostly stone block houses built into the hill, some a few hundred years old, with a few newer brick homes thrown in here and there.














We brought plenty of provisions for the nights that we were there. The ladies cooked us a nice little dinner every evening, and we had plenty of spumante, beer, and liquor for the big event. One of the guys even brought a HUGE box of fireworks, which we gladly took advantage of.

It was really interesting getting to see how they celebrated the holiday. There was a TV at the house, but it was hardly ever on. Someone brought a guitar, and they often spent the evenings playing and singing together. Of course there were playing cards as well, and Uno, and some board games too. One of the funnier things that happened was a game of Trivial Pursuit (in Italian, of course) that we played one evening... somehow my team kept getting questions about American things/places, and they would all turn and stare at me like I was an omniscient, infallible fountain of North American knowledge. But I did guess most of those questions correctly. And get this - at the end of the game, once we had all of our little Trivial Pursuit pie-piece thingies, and we were finally at the middle of the board for the win, the big question was: What river runs through the Grand Canyon? I think I laughed for about a minute before I could answer, and all the while the other team was cursing in Italian. On the 31st, we played a little game of soccer in a nearby park during the day, and in the evening we played beerpong! This was the same group of people I was hanging out with on Thanksgiving, so they had all been introduced to the game then and obviously it left quite the impression.

On the trip I even had the chance to see a little slice of Italian health care. My friend Simone was horsing around with another one of the guys while we were out watching the fireworks, and he ended up hurting his shoulder. It was worse the next day, so a few of us went with him to a hospital that was relatively close to get it X-rayed. They have socialized healthcare here in Italy, so all he had to do was show his Italian identification and that was it - no out of pocket costs or anything. Turns out he was fine, just a muscle bruising or something, so they put him in a sling and sent us on our way.

As I've said before, the Italians aren't big drinkers like we are in the states. They brought a couple cases of beer, a bunch of wine and spumante, and some bottles of liquor. It would have been enough for our group of friends to celebrate New Years, but here they stretched it out over the four days we were there and we even had enough left over at the end that everyone took home a liquor grab-bag! It was kind of like being a kid again and going to a birthday party, only like a million times cooler than a bag of candy and cheap plastic toys.

I'm sure there was some other notable stuff that happened, but enough time has passed that it's already slipped my mind. Sorry for the delay in writing about it, but I blame my parents. When I came back on the 2nd, there was a package waiting for me with the second season of Psych on DVD, and I pretty much have been sitting around the house watching that ever since. I'll close out with some pics of the big night: