Milano!

Europe is cool because you can take trips to other countries for the weekend. I must admit, though, that it's a very weird feeling to be in England, speaking English, take a two hour plane ride, and be in Italy, not speaking Italian. So it was a great weekend full of fabulous adventures, so here we go.

I got out to Stansted (which is not nearly as inconvenient as people say it is) with plenty of time for my flight though I had managed to forget my confirmation number. So I had to call Mark in California to get it for me. Awesome. Flight was only about 15 minutes late. Lydia met me at the airport and we took the bus back into Milan. We had pasta and wine at her place, went out for a beer (12%... yeah) and then went to bed. We were up and out the door by about 10am on Saturday, off to have Milanese adventures. It was good, because Lydia hadn't had time to do a lot of the touristy things so we got to do them all together for the first time.

Okay, Day 1: Milano

The first thing we did was to walk by the church of San Lorenzo which was mostly amusing because he had a Santa Clause hat on his head. We walked by a place with craaaazy looking marzipan! I was pretty excited about it and took a picture. The second thing we did was the Duomo . We walked around inside a bit but as is the case with most Roman cathedrals, it's sparse on the inside. The outside is pretty incredible, and we got to climb to the top (a theme for the weekend). You can walk all around the top and see the city from a bunch of different angles. As it was a sunny day, I got some good pictures:
We went to the Galleria which is a glorified shopping mall and I turned on the bull's balls, which means I'm going to return to Milan. We also took a tour the Teatro alla Scala, which is essentially the home of Opera. Lydia is very into opera so it helped to have a little bit of contextualization. After this we went to the Castello Sforzesco, which is basically a gigantic castle made of brick that creates a huge rock courtyard in the middle. We assume that they just wanted it to seem bigger, so left a hole in the middle. The REALLY exciting bit of that adventure was when we walked through to the back of the Castle, we found France! France was actually surrounded by a lovely park with a pretty pond and some nice public art. We had a bit of a stroll before turning back to continue exploring the Castello. We took a tea/coffee and cake break on our way back to her apartment for a rest. And let me say this, the Italians may know their coffee, but this is how tea was served (I do have to note that it took another three or four minutes for us to get the waiter's attention and have him bring me a tea bag): In the evening, we went for Chinese food and karaoke with some of Lydia's friends. It was good fun. Yes, you read that right. Chinese food and karaoke in Italy as my true Italian experience...