My weekend in Milano! I feel like I deserved this weekend. I kind of decided on a whim that this would be a great weekend to travel to Milan to see Dhana. For those of you who don’t know Dhana, she’s an Italy native who was an exchange student at my high school during senior year. She quickly joined my group of friends during her time at Penfield, and we’ve kept after graduation (thanks Facebook!). She’s now going to school in Milan and insisted on me coming to see her when I was over here for the semester. Anyways, I hadn’t been out of Perugia for a while and it felt time to do something by myself and for myself. The idea of travelling on my own was a bit unsettling, but I wanted to challenge myself so that obviously didn’t stop me.
So, Dhana is an absolute sweetheart (Dhana, if you’re reading this, you rock!) and it was so great to see her. Although we weren’t really that close during senior year, she embraced me as if we were and she made me feel so comfortable. And, as a bonus, Erin (Mahany) (another Penfielder) was in Milan visiting Dhana for a couple days during her fall break from studying in London, so there was another familiar face to see. We went strolling and shopping around the city as the sun went down, and I got my first glimpse of the Duomo of Milan. Ohhh umm wow. I unfortunately didn’t have my camera on me but I can remember the way it looked in the twilight- it was almost glowing. It was like how Pisa looked at night 4 years ago, radiating in the dark.
For dinner, I had hands down THE most enormous pizza I have ever attempted to stomach in my life. It was a giant cheese pizza with parmesan and eggplant.
Random interesting fact that I learned in my History & Culture of Food in Italy class: the Italian word for eggplant is “melanzane”. The name comes from a combination of “mela” (Italian for apple) and “nzane”, like the English world “insane”. When eggplant crop first got introduced, it appeared to the Italians as a strange looking apple, and they thought it was poisonous. Therefore, they named it the “insane apple”. Thanks, Peter Fischer, for that!
Let’s see if I can explain this pizza … the plate was about twice the size of my face, and the pizza was hanging off the edge all around by about an inch. Thankfully, living in Italy for three months has prepared me for this, and my expanded stomach did pretty well with finishing about ¾ of it. It was obviously amazing, and thought I would never eat again.
The pizza.
We spent the rest of the evening in the apartment, for our plans to go out on the town failed miserably due to our laziness. Instead, the three of us spent time catching up and reminiscing about high school. Lots of memories there.
On Saturday, we did more shopping (what else is there to do in Milan, anyways?). Unfortunately, we didn’t get to climb to the top of the Duomo, but we DID see all the other sights, the famous ridiculous streets of window shopping that I feel like I’m not even wealthy enough to look at, and we went to the top floor of the 7 story department store that gives us a great view of the top of the Duomo. And up there on that top floor where there was a restaurant and gourmet food for sale, we saw a bottle of 100euro olive oil, and my favorite: 95euro for “refined spring water from Beverly Hills” in a glass bottle with “bling” written in rhinestones. Yeah.
We also got some gelato (caffe & panna cotta), and I put my heel on the famous bull on the floor near the duomo and spun three times for good luck, and I bought myself a nice pashmina scarf that I can now say I got in Milan! Airforce Military jets flew over the city when we were there. Twice. It was strange and kind of scary, no one knows why they were there.
Me at the duomo!
After gelato and last shopping came my favorite part- The Palazzo Sforzesca (The Sforza castle). Another historical fact, this time from my Leonardo da Vinci class (wow, my classes are really coming in handy in this entry!): Ludivico Sforza was the Duke of Milan in the late 1400s, and Leonardo da Vinci lived in Milan and worked for him for about 20 years. He commissioned the painting of The Last Supper (which is in the Santa Maria delle Grazie church very close to the Sforza palace).
Aaaanyways, sorry if you couldn’t give a hoot about the history, but that was for Maddie (hehehee), the palace was sa-weeeet. We walked through to an amazing and enormous courtyard, through some smaller gardens, and out to the park behind it. It was away from the hustle & bustle of the city, and besides running into a couple tourists, we mostly saw locals taking a jog and couples walking hand-in-hand and cuddling on the benches. I love that it’s possible to put a park like that in the middle of a city. We were there as the sun set- it was incredibly peaceful and romantic. I was content there and very glad that Dhana made that one of our stops.
With Erin & Dhana at the fountain in front of the Sforza Palace.
Erin had to catch a train, and after she left we had dinner at Dhana’s apartment of 4 kinds of pasta/risotto at the apartment. Then, we (me, Dhana, Dhana’s boyfriend Matteo, and Dhana’s roommate Julia), went to Rolling Stone, a concert venue/discoteca. They were having some kind of International Student week, so they had to pretend to be French to get in, but they did, and … rave. Inside was, essentially, nzane (insane. Like insane. Get it? GET IT?!). Huuge. Double dance floors- one was on the second floor, surrounded by sound-proof glass so they could play different music. The atmosphere was a bit overwhelming at first- strobe lights, scary/twitching stuff playing on repeating TV screens, loud music, crowded. We got a drink and danced! Danced! Danced! It was mostly rock music (which I have noticed Italians love to dance to … I find it difficult) but they also played some awesomely random selections such as This Thing Called Love (and yes, I OBVIOUSLY did the dance from the Roost). The club closed at 4:30, and since the trams weren’t running that late, we walked all the way back to her apartment. We got back around 5:30 and crashed.
On Sunday, we slept in (obviously), and during breakfast/lunch we watched the 2008 MTV Europe music awards. This is only worth mentioning because it was OBAMA MANIA! It was out of this world- it’s like he’s a rock star. Except, he’s our next President, and Europe is ALL over it. In the half an hour that we watched, there were enormous references to/chants cheering for/things like Katie Perry’s sequined dress of the face of Barack Obama. It is just … crazy. I can’t believe how his worshipped over here. How all of this is so powerful, popular, and prevalent overseas. What is it like in the U.S.?
Then it was time for me to go back to Perugia, and boy did that begin an adventure. First, we got the train station 15 minutes before the train I was planning on taking left, but all the ticket machines wouldn’t let me buy a ticket, and we found out the train was full. Thankfully there was another train leaving 15 minutes later that I got a ticket for, but what happened to me with the first train must have happened to lots of other people, because it had 3x as many people as it should have. It was one of the compartment trains. I spent the first 2 hours squatting/curled up on my backpack on the floor in the very very narrow hallway outside the compartments. Luckily I snagged a seat when I did, about 2 hours to my connecting stop in Arezzo. The train kept filling up as we got closer to Arezzo, and it got to the point where all the compartments were full, people were standing in the compartments, all the seats in the hallway were taken, and people were standing on both sides of the compartments in between the seats. It was quite unpleasant. I sat there and thought, “ohh, so THIS is why people pay an extra 15 euro for an express train (which I took to Milan and it was soo nice) …
The only reason I caught my train out of Arezzo to Perugia is I followed some girls I heard talking on the train about going to Perugia as well- I didn’t know what time the train left Arezzo, but I knew the lay over was short I heard the girls talking about having to run. Thankfully I saw them out of the corner of my eye when I got off the train- they jumped off the train, across the platform, and jumped on the other train directly parallel to the one we just got off. I was about to run and double check the sign to make sure it was the right train, but then I heard the release of air that meant it was about to leave, so I just got on the train and hoped that it was the right one. I thankfully had walked onto a car on which I immediately saw someone else who I recognized from my program, so I knew I was on the right train. I was so thankful to not be travelling completely by myself anymore, so I sat next down to the kid I recognized and we wound up chatting the whole way back to Perugia about our travels and abroad experiences. I was glad he was with me when we got off the train too, because we had to track down a bus to take us back up the center since we missed the last mini-metro by 5 minutes. It was nice to meet someone else and to share stories and experiences about being here.
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