2 posts tagged “milan”

(Click on the pictures for bigger ones, I'm not sure if I did this right).

I didn't keep a journal when I went to Europe.  Stupid, I know.  Well, I kind of did, but I mostly only wrote in it when I was super homesick or mad at one of my friends or something, and at times a month or more would go by between entries.  So it's not really a good record of what I did.  So I think I'm going to start telling a couple stories from there, stuff I did, so that I won't forget it someday.

The first excursion I took from Spain was to Milan.  My friend Emily and I saw some cheap flights there, I think we initially wanted to go to Prague but it was ridiculously expensive.  So we went to Milan.  I had been to a few cities in Ireland already and we had been to Madrid with our group, and Granada, and all of those cities that I had seen, near any airport or city center or bus station you could generally just walk around and from any given point you'd see about 12 signs for hostels.  So we decided to just wing it on our trip to Milan, and show up and find housing once we got there.  So we took a bus to the airport, I can't remember if we flew out of Malaga or Madrid, but Al-Italia is awesome.  Best airline ever.  We got tons of snacks and food and it was only about a 90 min flight or so, and Emily is a total nutcase and we entertained this little Italian boy the entire time.

So we got to Milan and took a bus from the airport to the city center; when we got there it was probably 9pm.  We walked out of the bus station, sure we were going to see dozens of signs for hostels... nothing.  I assured Emily that just around some corner we'd hit a big major plaza or intersection and all the sudden we'd see some.  We walked for about an hour, with all of our stuff, and never saw a single sign, so I decided we'd try to find an internet cafe, which are also usually on every corner in major European cities, and we'd look it up on myhostels.com or whatever.  No sign of an internet cafe either.  So I tried to go in with our phrasebook to different restaurants and stores, stuff that was open, and stop people on the street, asking them where an internet cafe was.  Ok, I could have sworn that everywhere except France pretty much had the same word for internet.  Not so much in Milan.  I bet even the rest of Italy would have understood the word, but Milan is dead set on being the most difficult city ever.  We even tried the McDonald's. 

We finally saw this super-nice, 5-star hotel, and I thought usually the hotels have people that speak English.  So we went in and found Giancarlo, the NICEST concierge in the entire country of Italy I'm convinced, who explained that Milan is like THE ONLY CITY in Europe that has zero hostels.  And that there was some huge convention in the city that weekend, and everything was full.  So he got our price range and called around to his friends, and found some guy that could stick us in this back room for the one night, and then we'd have the next day to find somewhere to stay for the other 4 nights we'd be there.  So he gave us a map and directions, and we went and found this place, DEFINITELY off the beaten path in Milan, in what looked like Milan's little Chinatown.  We got to the hotel, paid the guy in cash, which he looked around and then put in his pocket, and he pulled out a key and took us to this little closet of a room that I think was supposed to be out of service, but I surmised that his boss wasn't there, and anyway I was grateful.  The room was actually pretty cute, it was decorated in this minty kind of green that I think was supposed to be that cute Italian Vespa green but kind of missed that and looked more like some cheap Miami teal.  But it sufficed, and it was clean, and I didn't see any bugs, and we were exhausted.

The next day the little guy helped us find somewhere we could stay for the other 4 days, so we packed up and went and found this other place, which was the CUTEST little hotel in the history of the world.  It was run by this guy, Mario, and his son, Mario, and son Mario's wife, who also had a little boy, about 4 or 5, named Mario.  We learned that the word "ciao" can literally mean anything; they had entire conversations with each other that consisted of the phrase "ciao, Mario", which could be a greeting, a goodbye, a question, an answer, whatever.  Old Mario didn't know what to do with us when we first came to check in, we tried to have this conversation in my sort of hybrid-phrase-book-Italian-with-Spanish-in-an-Italian-accent/wild hand gestures, until we figured out that his name was Mario Granato, which is Italian for granado, which in Spanish is the tree that "Granada"s come from, which we were living in Granada at the time, and all the sudden we were fast friends.

They served us breakfast every morning, which old Mario made, with fresh espresso, and old Mario would give us Italian lessons over breakfast, and laugh hysterically at our pronunciation.  And little Mario would come and talk to us, and not understand why we couldn't understand him, which is kind of funny for a kid who grew up in a hotel.  But I guess it wasn't exactly a touristy hotel, not American tourists anyway, it was kind of out of the way and small. 

So we went and saw the Duomo, which was covered in scaffolding, as is law in Europe, that every single old and gorgeous and historical building or monument MUST be covered in scaffolding throughout the entire tourist season.  But it was still exceptionally pretty, especially on the inside.  We also went to the museum in the castle and I spent about half a day in the park behind the castle just journaling and walking by myself.  We shopped ("shopped") in the Galleria near the Duomo, where they have a sweet record store but it has like THE original Gucci and Prada and Dolce & Gabbana, and stuff, and every keychain is worth approximately $79,000.  We went to a Leonardo Da Vinci museum, and skipped out on seeing the Last Supper painting because from what we could tell it was in this building all by itself, like, with nothing else to see, and it was about 14Euro to get in.  So we looked at the million reproductions of it in the gift shop instead. 

We also met up with one of Emily's friends from college, who was studying in Milan that semester, who randomly turned out to be this girl that went to my high school that I had had a few classes with, and we got to hang out with her friends at this two-story, Maggianos-esque ridiculously fancy McDonald's in the Galleria (across from D&G, and seriously rivaling it) and see her dorm, and go to some of the more hidden places, like the best pizza place in possibly the entire world, and this reeeally yummy aperitivo place with possibly the strongest frozen mixed drinks in the entire world. 

This is long so I'm wrapping it up -- OH, the mystery gelato stand.  We were just wandering one night and bought some gelato at this little stand kind of set into the side of a bakery, and it was literally the most incredible thing I've ever put in my mouth.  We stood there, in the middle of this pedestrian street, making the most embarrassing noises ever, for like 20 min.  We went back the next day, and it wasn't there.  Like, where we KNEW it had been, there wasn't even a sign of it, there was some other incredibly permanent-looking stand.  So we wandered that street for like an hour looking for this gelato stand, and looked the next night, and never found it again.  We probably tried 7 other gelato places trying to find one as good, and never did.  Sad day. 

We learned that when you go to a restaurant in the middle of Milan, on a high-traffic tourist/shopping street, and you see what looks like a dinner of pasta on a menu at a reasonable price, that is usually intended to be one of about 6 courses and will NOT fill you up.  And that wine is by far the least expensive drink to order at a restaurant, cheaper than coke and WAY cheaper than water.  And that Granada is an extremely friendly and wicked cheap place to live.  It was nice at the end to go "home".