Day 9

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Unfortunatly Milan turned out to be one of our least favorite places to stay. Beyond the hostle that I mentioned in the last entry the sites in the city were all too far apart and required us to travel on one of the worst Metros that we have traveled on so far. It was way too crowded well beyond rush hour and it smelled pretty bad. The few places that we traveled to were not that interesting. The most interesting part of this city was trying to find the sites. We started the day visiting the Duomo (cathedral) in Milan which was pretty, but most of the building was covered with scaffalding for cleaning. The stained glass windows were probably the best part of this disapointing visit. We paid for an audio guide of the church, but due to construction most of the areas mentioned on the audio guide were roped off. All we could do was imagine what they were talking about. We would have enjoyed climbing to the top of the church, but we forgot to do that before we left. We ended up coming back later to do that, but it was closed by that time.

Next we managed to find the tourist office and ask for directions to some sort of museum. The woman barely spoke english and basically just highlighted a map for us to find the museum. Eventually we found the building where the museum was supposed to be but as we started to wander around we suddenly realized that we were actually walking through an art school. We almost accidently walked into one of the classrooms before we thought to look upstairs. Upstairs we finally found the entrance to the museum but we weren't quite sure what to expect. We bought an audio guide and started by walking down a narrow hall, giving us the impression that this was a fairly small museum. Boy were we wrong! 25 rooms later we were nearing the end of the museum but it just kept going. We saw a few impressive paintings here, but overall it was just a big museum.
Not knowing what else to do in Milan, and being that we barely ate all day, we headed back towards our hostel to look for a place to eat. We found a little place where we could get some cheap pasta where we ran into our first experience trying to talk with someone who didn't speak any english. We had an interesting time trying to mime tap water, not bottled like is more often ordered in Europe. We weren't quite sure what we were ordering, but we managed and some pretty good pasta. The best part, though, was the parmasian cheese that we put on top. No where NEAR like what we have in the states. We ended the night by using the internet to reserve hostels for later on. Next is Florence!

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