Because of the strike happening with the German train system, we were unable to take the train from Bad Zwischenahn into Bremen to catch our flight this morning. Sabine was nice enough to drive us to the Bremen airport, which was about an hour away. Thanks Sabine!

We flew from Bremen into Bergamo (marketed as Milan by Ryan Air) where Mara was kind enough to pick us up. It was my first time meeting her, and she and Jonathan hadn’t seen each other for six years (since they studied together in Oldenburg).

After picking us up from the airport, Mara took us across the street to one of the largest malls in Italy. The outside walls of the mall were decorated with 3-D red alligators, and thousands upon thousands of plastic animals were waiting inside for us.

There were dolphins hanging from the ceiling.

And we saw this grouping of animals and thought it was quite funny. You could play the game “Which two of these aren’t like the other three?” Jonathan and I found it funny anyway. (He categorized by animal, while I categorized by color.)

While we were there, Mara thought we should all have some gelati (gelato is singular, and since we each had two scoops, it’s gelati). Yummy Yummy Yummy.

From here we went back to Mara’s house where she cooked us a fantastic dinner of fresh gnocchi pasta and a tomato salad.

Mara didn’t have Internet (well, she did, but not fast enough to use Skype), which is one of the reasons we always travel with a calling card. At Mara’s (where she only had dial-up), we were happy to have a calling card for making international calls.

We spent the rest of the evening drinking fine Italian wine and getting to know each other.