Milano

---

We left Lyon to head for Italy; lucky for us our train was booked to stop in Geneva and then drive (train?) most of the way through Switzerland. We had originally planned to go to Switzerland but with limited time and money we decided to save it for another time. So this was great – still got to check out all of the beautiful scenery!! At our stop in Geneva, we hopped out of the train with our big packs on and went for a little walk around the train station. We stopped into their Notre Dame Basilica and then took a couple of dorky photos on the streets before our train was ready to depart.

Milan was bittersweet. Milano Centrale station was really beautiful; we booked our tickets to Venice in advance and then made our way on the metro to our hotel. We had to take a suburban train to get to the place even though on the expedia map it had looked pretty central to downtown. We found our hotel in a pretty scummy area, completely not as advertised, but oh well- we dropped our bags and left to go out for the evening. We had no idea where to go so we just headed to the biggest tourist attraction figuring there would be some action around there.

We got to Duomo by metro and sure enough, lots of tourists. And after holding out for all of France so far, it was time for pizza and gelato! We found a restaurant with decent prices and immediately made fatal tourist errors- ordering water, eating from the bread basket they brought to the table – seemingly harmless. When the bill came, all of these things were added up plus a fee just for being in the restaurant – when we asked what the random 4 euro fee was, the waiter said, “you know – fork, knife, these things”. I picked Binnson’s jaw up off the floor as one obviously assumes that you are not charged for getting a fork/knife or whatever when you go to eat at a restaurant, 4 euros for a fork and knife is pretty steep especially when your dish is 8 euro. So tourist error #1- do not eat in the proximity of the biggest tourist attraction, things everyone knows! Oh well, time for gelato! Delish!

The next day, we spent the whole morning trying to buy a ticket to get to the top of the Duomo using our ‘Milano Cards’ that we had purchased the day before. There was seriously not one place that we could find to use them, information places pointed us all over the Milano Centrale station until we finally decided that our discount was not worth all the time we had wasted. I would totally not recommend anyone to ever buy that card if travelling to Milan. Heading back to Duomo, we got in line to see the inside. I was psyched that I had packed a sweater to go inside as there was a big sign with pictures showing no shoulders, etc for the dress code. It was about 34+ degrees, so needless to say- not sweater weather. Almost every girl in line was being told she wasn’t allowed to go in. When we got to the front, I threw my sweater on and the guy pointed at my legs and said, No. Well shit, here we are at the biggest thing to do in Milan and I can’t go inside. I joined the rest of the inappropriately dressed girls on the side and tried to think of what I could do – go buy some pants? Then Binnson remembered that he had a poncho in his pack – that’s right, A PONCHO. I said, @!%^ (use your imagination), whatever- let’s do this. I put my sweater back on and wrapped the big green plastic garbage bag like poncho around my waist and got back into the line. Success. Definitely got a lot of stares inside the church as I swished by in my garbage bag, but gotta do what you gotta do. We pondered selling it at a steep price to all the sad faced girls outside afterwards.

When we were done inside, we went around the back to pay way too many euros to climb the stairs to the roof of Duomo. Didn’t really realize that most of it was going to be under scaffolding and restoration when we got to the top so we tried to make the best of it and hung out for a bit, taking some pictures here and there before deciding it was pizza time again. After carefully selecting another pizza place in the same area, one that read on the sign – All taxes and fees included, no cover charge – we sat down to gobble down pizza’s twice the size of our faces. Once we were stuffed, we headed to the Castello Sforzesco (castle) to walk around and get jumped by guys with string bracelets trying to sucker tourists into forcing to give them money, “lucky bracelet, free, free, give me money”.

On the other side of the castle was a nice big park, we walked across the street and took a much needed rest on the park bench and people watched for a bit. It’s funny how the place that we were actually doing the least amount of stuff in was becoming so exhausting for us; the super hot weather didn’t really help. The park was really cool, I loved it there. All around were these little mini workout stations, and they were packed with locals doing their workouts – everywhere. Binnson and I just parked our fat pizza bellies down and observed, and once we were done watching everyone workout, it was time for gelato. We left back to Duomo plaza for a huge cone before heading back to the hotel. Tomorrow we are off to Venice!

---