Pizza and Pasta Done Right: Milan, Italy

Last Monday, the schools in Spain had a national holiday so there wasn't any school. Like any good traveler, Dan, Lucia, Ellen, and I took advantage of our free day, taking a long weekend trip to Milan, Italy to see what we could see. However, the story of our trip to Milan actually starts in Madrid on Thursday afternoon/night. Highlights of Madrid include: becoming intimately acquainted with a metro station trashcan when I got sick and then watching a man pull a newspaper out of the same trashcan right after I puked in it. Hanging out with Enrique, a 29 year old Spanish consultant Lucia and I met through Couchsurfing.com, a website where people from around the world offer their couches to people who are traveling and need a cheap place to stay. Only getting 3 and a half hours of sleep before our early morning flight to Milan.

We got to the Malpensa airport outside Milan before noon and discovered that it is VERY far outside the city and we had to take an hour bus ride to the center of town, during which I appeared as if I was suffering from narcolepsy due to my lack of sleep from the night before. I could not, for the life of me, keep my eyes open the entire time. We made our way through the city on the Metro system and finally found out hostel, Hotel Piola, located near one of the best pizza joints I’ve been to in a while, and home to Loki, the cutest white Boxer in the world.

It rained all Friday night as we trekked through the city to the Natural History Museum, and of course, I left my umbrella, which I was smart enough to pack, in our hotel room. The Natural History Museum was really neat and it had one of the best collections I have seen, especially a great collection of dinosaur skeletons and some rocking animal dioramas. Then we made our way back toward the hotel and had dinner at a nice little restaurant where we sampled delicious Italian pasta and risotto.

The next day we went into Milan with a battle plan since we had so much we wanted to see and not a lot of time to see it in. First on the agenda was a visit to Castello Sforzesco, a castle built in 1368 which now houses various museums and archives. After seeing the Castello and marveling at how incredibly old it is, we took the metro to Piazza del Duomo, one of the signature sights in Milan. It is a major tourist attraction with the cathedral Duomo and the Galleria Vittorio Emanuale II flanking it. I also believe that the piazza is the hang out of nearly every pigeon in northern Italy because you couldn’t walk five steps without almost smashing at least 3 pigeons.

We then walked to the Santa Maria delle Grazie, the church which houses Leonardo da Vinci’s famous mural The Last Supper. The set up for visiting the painting was very high tech. You buy a ticket for a 15 minute time slot and when you arrive you are shepherded through a series of rooms which are closed off by timed automatic doors. You have to go through two rooms before you even reach the room with the mural in it. Being able to stand in front of the painting, knowing that someone painted it hundreds of years ago, left me a bit awestruck and then the only thing I could think about was the movie “The Da Vinci Code” and what it said about the painting.
So after visiting the mural, we walked back to the Piazza del Duomo to take a closer look at the cathedral. We wandered around inside for about a half hour before we discovered the fact that you could climb about a billion stairs up a tower to get to the roof of the cathedral. After climbing for 10 minutes at an amazingly fast pace up a cramped spiral staircase in which you had to plaster yourself against the wall to get past people coming down the stairs, I arrived that the coolest gathering place in Milan, 90 meters in the air. You could see the entire city of Milan from the rooftop and the Alps in the far distance to the north. Then we walked over to the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a glass covered shopping arcade housing prestigious stores such as Prada, Louis Vuitton, Gucci, and McDonalds…seriously, not kidding here…McDonalds was right there alongside some of the top fashion names in the world.

We spent the rest of the night walking around, looking at shops, eating dinner, perusing a really neat sidewalk exhibition about the universe, and helping Dan find the perfect winter coat…cough cough, excuse me, coats. He got two so now he’s set for a lifetime of winters.


Sunday, we checked out of our hostel, dropped our bags in storage at the train station and took the early afternoon train to the city of Como on Lake Como, one hour outside Milan. The city was founded in its current location by Julius Ceaser and the ruins of the old city walls along with a castle are good sights to see. If I spoke Italian and had enough money, I would move to Como in a heartbeat. The town is gorgeous, on the water and surrounded by mountains. It has a lot of shops, great gelato, and many celebrities have homes there like George Clooney, Madonna, and Sylvester Stallone.

We spent the day touring Como and discovering its hidden secrets before we took the train back to Milan, where we picked up our bags, stopped in at a sports exhibit that was open until 10:30 pm, then found a café for some late night snacks and drinks before we went back to the train station to wait out the night. Our flight back to Madrid left at 6:30 am Monday morning and we didn’t want to spend the money for another night in the hostel so we spent the night in the train station waiting room with the homeless and other travelers playing cards and talking to people there. We met a group of American students studying abroad in Italy who were coming back from Greece. We caught the 4:15 bus to the airport and thus began a solid 14 hours of travel from Milan back to Baeza via one plane and three different buses.

To top the whole journey off I accidentally left my passport on the bus from Granada to Baeza, so I spent Monday night freaking out and worrying. However, I am extremely blessed because the next day the director at my school went with me to the bus station and asked about it. Turns out my passport only made it to the next town over and they had a bus driver bring it to Baeza with the next bus, so I was missing my passport for less than 12 hours. Life is extremely good sometimes.

I’m putting a link on here to my Facebook photo album of Milan for everyone to see, so enjoy!





http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2045423&l=44cc8&id=11400089