Ciao Bella

a while ago, back in november or december sometime i believe, i made a new friend. her name is samina and she is from oregon. we both realized we needed a travel buddy, and soon we were planning trips for once it was winter break. our first destination? milan. why? because it wasn't too expensive and and it sounded like an interesting place to go. it was only after purchasing tickets to go there for four nights that i was informed that you could see milan in a day.. oh good. turns out though, this was actually kind of a good thing. seeing as when we actually went i was recovering from being sick, it was nice that we could have a laid back trip and not be constantly rushing from one tourist sight to another.

our trip began a bit late. we were flying with easyjet so this really didn't surprise us all that much. but when we finally arrived in milan we knew we had a little bit of time to kill before our couchsurfers would be available. so we walked around the train station, found an internet cafe, even found a real cafe for a snack.

what a pretty train station :)

as it got closer to 7 we attempted to get to our couchsurfer's apartment on our own. we headed to the metro station and spent some time staring at the map. a guy even came up to us and asked if we needed help, which we assured him we didn't... until two minutes later we realized we weren't even sure which stop we were at and wished we had just accepted his help. oh well, we figured it out eventually! though we had gotten the metro figured out at that point, our plan failed and we couldn't figure out where exactly he lived on the map, we finally decided to take him up on his offer to pick us up at the metro station. Pierluigi took us back to his apartment and we waited around for a bit until his roommate Eric showed up, and then promptly headed off to dinner. we went to this place with aperitivo's. basically you pay 10 euros for a drink, and then can eat however much you want at the buffet. and i have to say i enjoyed this one more than the one i ate at in rome.. though our hosts still told us they weren't all that impressed haha. i thought my drink was pretty, though definitely stronger than expected:

the next day was a big day. well, i mean sort of (we still didn't start till 11.. i told you it was relaxed :)). samina and i decided to start off by checking out the duomo, which is the massive church in milan. on the way though, we accidentally got caught in a tourist trap. two men came up to us and before we knew it we had "free" bracelets on our wrists. and each of us also got an extra one for the boyfriends we pretended to have. it's interesting how they are so happy to give you a "free" bracelet, then before you know it they are asking for a donation... once the bracelet is already securely tied and you are stuck in the situation. i think samina ended up pulling out like 50 cents or a euro. i didn't have any change on me. they, however, were hoping for a 5 or 10 euro contribution. sorry guys, not gonna happen!

this is still on my wrist. eric told us later in the evening that it is bad luck to take it off.

we actually decided to get some food before checking out the church, and after seeing the size of the pizza once stepping into the restaurant, we decided it would be necessary to share. it was massive. but pretty good :)

we got some gelato too after. and paid wayyyyy too much for it. and it wasn't even the best gelato. oh well. i'd say i did pretty well on everything else i got, but i guess you cant win every time.

but anyways. the duomo. i thought it was very impressive from the outside. not quite as impressive inside as i had expected, though still very pretty. and not as long a walk up to the top as i expected... but this last part is a good thing.

outside

inside

view from the top!

while we were pausing at the top, things got a little interesting too. samina accidentally stuck her arm in bird poop! poor girl. i thought it was hilarious and immediately went to document it. she was a pretty good sport about the picture though.

one thing i learned about milan is that they really like mcdonalds. and what i mean by that is we saw them EVERYWHERE. and if we couldn't see a mcdonalds at any moment, we probably saw a sign for a mcdonalds. there was even one in the galeria. this reallyyyy nice openish mall area.

the other corners like this one had stores such as prada or louis vuitton. but i mean, i guess mcdonalds is the same idea? haha

i have also learned that italy has some pretty good wines. like this one our hosts served us one night at dinner, along with some other delicious food that i felt terrible because i couldn't eat much of it:

after our delicious dinner. we decided to play some pool. we played enough games so that we could have every combination of partners. the surprising/awesomely cool part? despite the fact that i was probably (ok i was) the worst one playing, my team always managed to win. which meannnt that everybody got to be a winner!

win number 1: i had actually apologized before we started because i was sure i was going to make us lose

win number 2: at this point i was just confused how my team kept winning

win number 3: i was reallyy glad we won because i was going to feel bad if samina was the only one who didn't get to win once!

for full day number two we went to see the castle. though castle doesn't really seem like the appropriate word to use:

once inside we saw that there were multiple museums. so we each paid a total of 1.50 and got access to all of them! one had old pictures of the city and it was interesting to see the differences. here were two of my favorite displays in the others:

afterward we walked around the park nearby for a bit. well after samina bought a purse off of one of those guys selling fake brands. he said 50. she said 20. and with some bargaining and the fact that the cops were coming, she got what she wanted!
then we went and spent a while at a cafe, samina drinking her wine, me eating her chips. how relaxing!

at this point we realized we had seen most of what milan had to offer us. seeing as we aren't rich and therefore couldn't take advantage of the loads of high fashion that is being sold in milan (a 30,000 euro watch? no problem!), we realized a day trip should probably be in order.

so the next day, we headed to lake como, a town about an hour away by train. upon arrival, we found a beautiful lake, along with freezing cold weather.

now about this freezing cold weather. i really thought we were being babies about it. i thought it couldn't possibly be thaaaaat cold, we just needed to get over it and enjoy the town. and then. then it started SNOWING. not a ton, and it stopped later. but seriously our reaction was of complete and udder surprise and confusion. the snow, however, did seem to justify why we felt so ridiculously cold.

after walking around the lake for a bit, and stopping for lunch of course. we decided to take the funiculaire of the hill. and this isn't just any hill. i swear it makes san francisco hills not look quite as bad. (see that little building at the top? that is actually a fairly big building, and we went all the way up there!)

this was the funiculaire that took us up there:

when we got to the top we realized we couldn't actually see all that much due to building/tree obstructions, so i was glad i had taken some pictures on the way up:

and there wasn't all that much to do at the top either, buttt there was a cafe, and it was a little bit warmer there, so we decided to go inside. i got a hot chocolate, which was similar to the one in rome in the fact that it was pretty thing. honestly, it was kind of like pudding... except warm. the italians do have a strange way of making hot chocolate.. it is good though.

after heading back down the mountain, we took a walk to the other side of the lake. and we walked pretty quickly hoping we would feel our toes again soon. there was a park, and some kids rides!

you can see the funiculaire in the  background!

not quite ready to head back to milan yet, and mostly wanting a place to warm up, we decided to do a bit of shopping. and by shopping i mostly mean wandering from one heated store to the next wondering how things were so expensive even when they were on sale.. though better than some of the prices we had seen in milan.

eventually we did finally decide to head back to milan. we had already purchased our tickets, and it turned out there was actually a train leaving in 5 minutes. we hurried onto the train not even thinking about validating them since we didn't see a machine anyways. this was something we should have thought about a little more because a train worker did actually come through looking for validated tickets. let's remember that each of these tickets were less than 4 euros. i think this guy wanted us to pay a penalty of like 40 or something. luckily for us, this guy didn't speak english, we didn't speak italien, and we didn't really have any money on us. samina even opened up her wallet for the guy to show her lack of cash. i managed to come up with 5 euros. we got him to agree that that was enough and he left. then five minutes later he came back and wanted another 50 cents. but not my 50 cents, he wanted it from samina.. not sure what the story was there. she came up with it and he wrote us some kind of ticket and our business with him was done. moral of the story? i'm really glad i had 5 euros on me because it was the smallest bill so it could still look like more money but not pay thaaat much, and really glad we didn't have more because i'm sure he would have taken as much as he could have. next time we will be more careful about validating our tickets though. lesson learned.

another night of pizza followed, this time with pierluigi accompanying us. once again a large enough pizza that samina and i split it. oooh and there was bruschetta. i love bruschetta. :)
that night we also thought about taking a morning trip to verona before i had to get to the bus station by 1 to get back to the airport. we figured we could wake up super early and do it.. if it was an hour away. problem was it was an hour and a half away. too bad. coulda been fun! maybe next time.
but the following morning we explored for about an hour before returning to grab our backpacks, say goodbye and thank you to our hosts, and i headed back to lyon! excited to be returning, not all excited about the studying that would need to follow before finals a couple days later.
well italy was fun, not sure if i'll make it back again this trip, but definitely a country i'd like to visit more in the future!
ciao.