Blogs from Milan, Lombardy, Italy, Europe - page 6

DAY 1 - Thursday Our lives have been so insanely busy for the last few weeks, we worked up until the last minute, finishing up right before we walked out the door. As usual, it's very hard to say goodbye to our baby kitties, knowing how sad they are when we leave. The airport was smooth and fast, security has lessened a lot for now. We flew to New York and had to change planes. The 8 hour flight to Milan was one of the most uncomfortable, awful flights we've taken. Marleah has really bad knees and was in misery, the food was horrible, we had only gotten 2 hours of sleep the night before and it's so hard to sleep on the plane. We managed to make it through fueled by our excitement for Italy ... read more

Off to Lake Como today for a day tour. Caught the tube down to the meeting point. Leaving at 8.45 it was about a 90 minute ride to the first sight of the lake. The size of the lake is 146 square kms, and is surrounded by Swiss alps. The Italians tell us proudly that none of the lake crosses the Swiss border so it is all theirs. After a short tour around the town of Como, we board our boat for a two hour cruise around. The history of some of the villas are highlighted to us and we see where George Clooney's villa is. We also see one of the most photographs villa on a point and find out some of "Casino Royale" was filmed there. (Villa del Balbianello) Landing at the town of ... read more

Travelling day today as we catch two trains to get to Milan. Left Lyon about 10.30 for the first trip into Geneva Swiizerland. We follow a river all the way up as the scenery changes into the mountains. There was no passport control, but police are on the train and check all passengers. Arriving at Geneva, walk through customs and they are just randomly checking a few, but not us. We had an hour between trains, which is enough to get your bearings and double check the next train you get on is the right one. Buying Subway for lunch unaware that we need Swiss Franks and if we gave them Euro, we would only get Swiss money for the change. Not something you think about, just used the Visa card. Back on the next train ... read more

Today was our last day in Milan and on vacation. I felt so ill that I cancelled the tour I had booked because I couldn’t imagine walking around in the heat for 3 hours. I rallied a little in the late morning so we headed downtown to the highly reputed La Rinascate department store so I could look for something cute and unusual for TDB. What we found was Bloomindale’s with more high-end goods. There were more designer names than I’ve ever seen in one place, although since I buy almost everything online I'm not usually in settings with lots of high end clothing stores. Like high end department stores I've been in, La Rinascate was organized into little “boutiques”, one for each designer with a salesperson attending to each of the “boutiques”. In the US, ... read more

We had high expectations for the Milan World’s Fair since they expect 20 million visitors over the course of the event. Plus, the opening provoked violent protests by 30,000 people so we figured there would be some content, maybe even politically incorrect content. The theme of the event is food sustainability and accessibility. A lot of countries exhibiting don’t have much to say since they can’t feed their population today and certainly won’t be able to do so tomorrow, in other words food is neither accessible or sustainable in their countries. Scant attention was paid to the issues of hunger and if you don't even talk about problems, how can you contemplate fixing them? E ven in the US where hunger is problem for 1/3 of the children in this country, you would have thought everyone ... read more