Milan

Ok, so I am going to start with Milan and work my way through the weekend. I wrote each post as I went, and now I have time and internet to post them... and I uploaded pics too. I hope you enjoy it.

Milan

So as I write this, I am zooming (or rather crawling actually) across the Italian country side heading to Venice by train. Even though the Trentialia website has been less than friendly and does not accept American credit cards, once I made it to Milan, it was rather easy to buy a ticket from the Fasticket booth… but now I am getting rather ahead of myself…

Thursday night, after a stressful experience navigating the metro because of train problems, we made it to the airport. We took the metro to the airport which is really rather easy, however when we arrived at the airport it became apparent that we needed to have bought tickets for the train (RER) before we got on the train so that we could get out of the train and enter the airport… not having done this we were forced to sneak through the turnstile things (they are more like doors that open) on other peoples’ tickets… very delinquent. However I will publicly thank here the woman who I snuck through with… thanks for saving me the 8.50 euros it should have cost me to go to the airport… o well, live and learn!

The plane was very quick, even though I was only supposed to bring one bag, and was forced to stuff my backpack into my other bag… let’s just say the woman at check in was not impressed by my stuffing abilities… I was saved the 11 euros it would have cost to check a bag. Basically I broke every rule and airport stipulation before we had even gotten on the plane… but I am still 19.50 euros richer than I might have been, (and with a proud uncle on the other side of the world) and I made it to Italy just fine (with only one really dirty look!) It was about 11pm when we got to Milan, and we took a bus to the main train station where we should have been able to take a bus to our hostel… but it turned out to be raining rather heavily, and realizing that the bus was not going to be very easy to find, we took a cab to the hostel which really wasn’t far at all. The hostel was on the fourth floor of some random building, and the beds were hard as boards… but that didn’t stop us from falling into them and sleeping soundly.

Friday morning started right around 9am, which was just fine. If there were two words I could use to describe Milan they would be these: RAINY and ADVENTURE-FILLED. It was our first real day in Italy, and it was pouring. The rain was very steady and of course in true Moberg style I did not have an umbrella (since it is our prerogative that only wimps use umbrellas).
I have never been to Italy before, and I was excited to see the country and the city, regardless of the rain. It wasn’t too cold so a little rain never hurt anyone right? We took the bus (much easier to find in the light) back to the train station to buy tickets for today to get to Venice, and then our day began. However, at this point, as the rain continued to come down steadily, with no sign of stopping, I decided to break down and buy an umbrella from a very nice man in the train station. Ok so there were like twenty billion people trying to sell us umbrellas, but I did find a nice guy with a green umbrella (probably from China—the umbrella not the man). As the day progressed, it became very apparent that this was one of the best three euro investments I have made in a long time… since the rain did not let up until about 6:00pm.

And so we set off to find Il Duomo- the major cathedral in Milan that is at the center of the city. We got back on the same bus… but it all was very challenging. First the buses are not marked with routes in them like in Paris, so we sort of just rode the bus rather haphazardly (and again for free since we couldn’t figure out how to pay, but no one else seemed to be paying either so…) but we did make it to the last stop which should have been really close to the church.

I would now like to take a moment to say how much I admire Alana for coming to Italy for her study abroad… a place where she is not very familiar with the language. Not knowing a word of Italian came to be rather frustrating yesterday. So many times when we were looking at a map, or a menu or anything, I thought… ugh I just wish I knew what that word meant. I chose to study abroad in France for several reasons. There was a program I wanted, and I have been trying to learn French forever, and it will be good for my language skills etc. However I didn’t realize how easy I have had it in Paris until I came to Italy. I have been studying French in some capacity since I was about 7 years old… thus while I am not perfectly fluent, navigating Paris has been a breeze. I have not come across a word that I really needed to know that I couldn’t figure out. It has been so easy! Coming here, I realized how not knowing the language makes everything infinitely more difficult, challenging, and really time consuming. I know Alana had one semester of Italian, but still, it really takes guts to show up someplace where you really don’t even know how to say, “May I please have?” or “Where can I find…” and set up camp to live. So Alana, I really admire your brave soul that came to live in a country for 5months without mastery of the language… you are outstanding.

But back to Il Duomo. We got off the bus, promptly went the wrong way, and wandered around for a while in the rain, looking at things and adventuring… until we finally asked the police guy on the street how to find it, and turned back the right way that we should have gone in the first place. An excellent display of the lack of Moberg sense of direction… thanks mom for that little inheritance. But adventure is what this trip is about… and taking the scenic route to the cathedral in the rain was definitely that. When we found the cathedral, it was as impressive as one would expect an Italian cathedral to be… intricately carved on the outside, and the entire façade was made of marble. It was really impressive, and the picture here does not really do it justice. The inside was just as beautiful… but also very wet and cold.


When we finished exploring the church we were most definitely hungry and getting a little cold from having been in the rain for a while… even though the handy green umbrella was actually very helpful. We had lunch in a little café that was rather cheap (relatively speaking) and set back out, into the rain to find the church where Leonardo’s famous painting of the Last Supper resides. We took the metro, which like the bus, was more confusing than it should have been because of the language barrier. I also was kind of an idiot and mistook the credit card slot for the money slot in the ticket machine and got a euro stuck in the credit card slot and proceeded to spend 10 minutes trying to get it back out…( it is a good thing I am cute because I am not too bright). But we made it to the stop and found the church (or former monastery rather) where the painting is… only to be greeted by signs that said “SOLD OUT” apparently, only 15 people can see the painting every 20 minutes so you have to buy your tickets in advance. Well the lady at the desk told us to “try coming back next week” which won’t be happening… So the picture you see here is the monastery where we almost saw DaVinci’s Last Supper. So there.


Then we set out on more adventures at the behest of our guide book, where we went and saw a fourth century basilica, the basilica of Sant’ Ambrogio. It was built there originally on the site of a roman pagan temple, and it has certainly changed a lot over the last sixteen centuries, but it was really very cool, and it was not in the rain. The inside was also magnificent, and much less touristy than the last church. I found my own version of the last supper on one of the altars and decided that it was just as cool as the one painted by DaVinci… since his is kept behind lock and key (can you tell I was a little annoyed?) We also went down some stairs behind the altar where we discovered a tomb of some martyrs and of the guy who originally founded the Basilica and their bones were really there, and we saw them. It was weird. Simon Foss would have thought that that was awesome, and totally creepy. I actually wished that Dr. Foss could have been there with us because he could have told us a lot about some of the things we saw, like the stones in the walls and things like that. One thing about exploring on your own is that you see some cool things, but you don’t always get a lot of depth in your knowledge of those things. It is nice to have a guide, or someone there who can enrich your knowledge of what you are actually seeing.


But at this point it was time for another “get out of the rain” break, and we stopped at a little café on the road where I was once again promptly confronted by the language barrier. The man at the counter started speaking to me in a very friendly way in Italian… and all I could do was stare. But he quickly figured out that I didn’t understand… and I said coffee and held up two fingers… and he figured it out. This little stop in this café made me love Paris a little less, because the coffee only cost 80centimes… and in Paris, coffee is never less than 2 euros. It is a very expensive city, and Milan’s cheap coffee brought this very sharply into focus. We warmed up a little (if not dried off, since staying dry at this point seemed hopeless even with our handy green umbrella close at hand.)

We then went and found the Castello Sforzesco which was a fortress from the 15th century. Simon Foss also would have thought that this was cool since it had secret passage ways and things to explore, and we explored the gardens/ park behind the castle too… even though we were the only ones crazy enough to be there on a really rainy day in February. I can imagine in the spring and summer Italy is very beautiful, and full of warm Mediterranean wonderfulness. From the castle we went to one last church where we found S. Lorenzo Maggiore, which is a large church that has a line of 9th century columns in front of it. The columns were very cool, and the church was also very beautiful, and very silent. I feel like all of our professors would be very proud of us for going and finding all of these random, but cool and historical sites in Milan… we went just because they were old and neat, and obviously worth seeing. By this point the rain had let up a little, but our shoes and pants were still soaked, so we made our way back to the hostel. We took the cool tram that runs all over the city (where people are more likely to pay for it than they are on the bus, but it is till clearly not obligatory… (Which seems to me to be a very good example of the tragedy of the commons… that is a shout out to you Dr. O’bannon if you ever see this.) But we took the tram just to do it, which was neat, and then the metro again and finally the bus back to our hostel. Peeling off wet clothes and finding dry ones felt amazing, and we rested until about 8pm, when we went out on an adventure again to find some Italian pizza for dinner. We succeeded excellently, and found this place that had huge pizzas (see the picture!) and they were amazing. We spent about two and half hours having dinner, in true Italian style, and made it back to the hostel around 11, with just enough time to pack up and fall into bed before we set off for Venice this morning. We had to stuff our shoes with news paper and leave them by the heater because they were soaking wet from the day’s adventures. We used a free fashion paper we found on the street… so I guess I just want to say sorry Milan… that is what I think of your fashion magazines… good for drying out wet shoes.

Now we are about an hour from Venice, where I am sure another days worth of adventures await us… hopefully with a little less rain, but o well! So over all Milan was a success, and we shall see what Venice holds… Ciao!