Milano, Italia

This post begins my 10 day adventure to Italy so get excited!! =) I am going to write 1 for each city, and some will certainly be longer than others, but the pictures I eventually post will tell you the most!

Saturday, Jan. 31
Heather, Dorothy and I arrived at the Granada airport 4 hours early because none of us actually checked the paperwork, and I thought we left at 5:00 PM but we didn't leave until 7:00! So we bought some books and magazines and Kinder chocolate (yum!) and waited it out in high spirits. We arrived in Milan around 10:00 PM and did not realize that the directions to our hostel were from a different Milan airport and we were actually about an hour outside of the city...So we found a shuttle and were dropped off in what we believed to be the middle of nowhere. The streets were nearly deserted. NO ONE spoke English, and whoever said Italian and Spanish were similar was wrong! So we walked around showing people our directions to our hostel and not understanding a word of what people were saying to us. Finally, a very enthusiastic man took our directions and told us that he knew where it was (in very broken English) so we followed him thinking he was going to point us in the right direction. Instead we find ourselves in his "taxi" watching his GPS and taking a 20 minute ride to the hostel while he belted out Italian tunes. Before we left, we asked him how much it was going to be and he said 30 euro total. When we arrived, however, he demanded 30 euro from EACH OF US and when we tried to fight him, he said he would give us a discount of 25 each. We were exhausted, we had all of our passports, credit cards, etc and just decided to pay him and get safely into the hostel which was also virtually in a deserted, middle of nowhere area. So we get into the hostel and encounter the very welcoming staff who were from Romania and spoke English! We recounted our story for them and they laughed and said we got ripped off - it should have costed us around 15 euro total rather than 75. We didn't think it was very funny....but they gave us free bottled water ("with gas" which is like seltzer water and apparently preferred among italians - yuck!) Check-in took about 1/2 an hour because when we gave him our IDs (2 Illinois licenses and a school ID), he wrote down Jesse White, Jesse White, and Curtin Heather - haha, and when he realized it, he had to re-do all of the paperwork. Finally, we put our stuff down and set out to get our first Italian food! We found a nice restaurant, and I ordered pepperoni pizza which in Italian is pizza with red peppers. Nontheless, it was delicious, and I learned to order "salame" or "salamino" in the future. The hostel was very nice inside. We had our own private three-bed room with our own bathroom. It was virtually like a budget hotel. We crashed around 12:30.

Sunday, Feb. 1
We woke up early to a wonderful breakfast - cappuchinos, croissants, and NUTELLA!!! which is a chocolate spread (sort of like butter) for toast. I was in heaven. Then we set out to explore the city. It was freezing and rainy!!! And because of the warm weather in Granada and the limited packing space (check out my backpack for 10 days in the pics), I lacked proper winter attire - especially gloves! But we saw the Duomo (cathedral) and it was by far my favorite one out of all of the cities we went to. It looks like it is made of crystal and from a Disney movie =) And in the piazza (plaza) outside while we took pictures, I was offered bird seed which I thought I was supposed to drop for the masses of birds...but before I could thank the man (who was expecting money in return), I was attacked by a flock of pigeons, and I dropped the seed and ran away screaming!!! HAHA when I think about it, it is hilarious, but I was seriously scared out of my mind. They are nowhere near as bad as cicadas, but I now have a little fear of pigeons after being nearly pecked to death! We walked around the beautiful square for a while where all of the shopping was located - Chanel, Prada, Gucci, Louis Vuitton, etc. It was fun to window shop for a while, but we ended up wanting to get the heck out of Milan, and we paid extra to take an early train to Venice...and we also had to pay 1 euro to use the public bathrooms in the train station! It was like shopping carts at ALDI, except you didn't get your money back when you left =( and that was our Milan experience - pretty disastrous I know! But keep reading!!