Milan

Goodbye Milan

You were a fun city and while we didn’t have a lot of time to spend together what we did have time to see was nice.

Our taxi from the Milan airport was the most expensive part of the stay but, was expected since we decided to take the taxi instead of the train even though it was quite a lot more money.  Wandering around a strange city looking for a hole in the wall hostel after a 10pm flight didn’t seem like appropriate torture for the girls after a 24 hour travel day!

I’ve now firmly concluded that public passenger car drivers (mini busses, taxis, ubers and the like) are all just wanna be Indy car drivers.  Our guy drove 110-140kph down the empty streets, taking corners without more than a tap on the breaks <SMH> not as crazy as Bangkok but a speed demon for sure!!

Our hostel was nice and relatively inexpensive, luckily they had some hangers and a sort of clothes rack because the first order of business when we arrived was laundry day! Yeah, we’d been up for nearly 24 hours but, after 5 days without a place to wash stuff in Africa, our clothes supply was dwindling.  Our room had a shared balcony so the clothes rack met the balcony and the clothes were clean and everyone felt better. Did I mention how awkward the girls felt using a shared bathroom (and balcony) to do laundry? 😃 well… Yeah they seemed to not care for that so much, me? I didn’t mind a bit!

A couple of random observations we had: the balcony doors and exterior windows all around the city opened like doors and if you turn the knob up the top hinge disangages and it leans inward.  The first night I thought I had broken it!

They use “skeleton” keys everywhere

Apparently Italians are master graffiti artists!  Everywhere that wasn’t moving was graffitied and this is just one example that I laughed about.

We visited the Duomo, which is the second largest church in Italy. We also rode around the city on one of those double decker open air tourist busses! Yes it was as much fun as they look like!

The Duomo was amazing on the outside but the inside… Wow, just wow.  They were tuning the pipe organ (or something) while we were there so the experience of hearing that made it all the better.  We were able to climb the eleventy billion stairs and walk on the roof terraces (because I wouldn’t pay the 3$ ea to take the elevator Muahahahah!) the view was amazing but somewhat hinderd by scaffolding they are using for refurbishing.

At midnight one night it sounded like a party showed up on the street so I walked out to see 50-100 rollerbladers going down the street, no idea what that was about!

I thought Japan had the strangest vending machines but, I think Italy wins… I don’t even know what to say…

I ordered a spatapam thinking it was a pizza type, this is what showed up… It was amazing!

This is a mall next door to the duomo… I… Don’t know why they’d do that but hey it looks nice

Us crammed in the smallest elevator ever!

These are some pics I snapped on the train ride to Tirano Italy where we’ll catch our next train across the alps!




Sara is mailing cards to someone… Who? I dunno 😃