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Monday, January 3rd started way too early for anyone's own good. Amy and I decided that we wouldn't need to spend three full days in Lausanne so instead we chose to take a little jaunt down to Milan, Italy to stroll around the fashion capital of the world, have a little lunch, observe the natives then return to Switzerland later that evening. We boarded the higher-speed Italian train for a nice comfy first class three-hour ride though the early morning Swiss-Italian Alps. The trip was pure relaxation and I wafted in and out of slumber the entire way. While traversing the Alps the sun had not yet risen and I was treated to an amazingly beautiful celestial display of a sharp crescent moon hanging lazily in the sky with Venus burning brightly at its southern tip. Just enough sunlight was beginning to refract around the curvature of the earth and through the atmosphere to cause and ever-so-slight silhouette of the nearly invisible, snow laden mountains on all sides of the train. Warmth inside the train, bitter cold outside. The moment was perfection. An hour or so after passing through the Alps, we rolled into Milano, the economic powerhouse of Italy. Not failing to live up to its grubby, industrial reputation, we disembarked the train and stepped out of the station into a poisonously toxic brown smog blanketing the entire city. Lovely.
Alright, enough of that.
First impressions of Milan: not necessarily good. There is graffiti everywhere, a bit of trash blowing around, and a brown haze levitating over the entire city. But since I had heard about this all before, I was not surprised. After a little panini and focacia breakfast, we finally arrived at the Sforzesco Castle, which excited me since it's always fun to see something in a book and then to actually be able to see it with my own eyes. But before going into the castle grounds, we took a little "short cut" through the surrounding castle park which turned out to be Drug Addict Freak Fest 2000. Every unsavory person residing in the city of Milano apparently also has a home-away-from-home vacation spot picked out in Castello Sforzesco Park. Of course AmyLynn and I were stupid enough to continue our stroll right through the middle of it all. The highpoint of our wanderings was when we noticed that we were being stalked by some freak whom Amy and I quickly named, "The Hisser". The name is self-explanatory - as he stalked us from about 10 meters (yards) behind he slowly dragged his feet and begin hissing as us. Alrighty then. . . I'm not exactly sure why an Italian (presumably) would stalk a couple of nice Americans like Amy and me and then hiss at us from behind, but I suppose it had something to do with either us being on his territory or him wanting to sell us drugs, and the "hiss" was code for, "Hey Americani, wanna buy some crack?" Whatever the case, Amy and I stepped up the pace and beat feet the hell outta there! The last thing I needed was to stick around and have some druggy slime bag accost us with some disease-infected needle and leave us for dead. Thanks, but no thanks. Arrivaderci amigos! After our brush with the underbelly of Italian society, we went for a little gander at the very large Sforzesco Castle in front of which was located a really scenic water fountain and snapped up a couple pictures there. Just as we were walking around through the castle grounds, the battery in my camera appeared to die and so Amy and I went on a little quest to find a replacement battery. Well, one hour and $20 later, we finally found an open camera shop and bought a new battery, but to no avail since the problem with my camera was not that the battery was dead, but that the ENITIRE CAMERA ITSELF had crapped on me!!! Yes, I was bitter. Only days before I was lamenting and shaking my finger at Amy for the death of her camera and went on a long monologue about the pro's of buying a real camera (implying that my point-and-shoot was a "real" camera) and here we were, six days later, and my camera suddenly croaks on me in Milan. A shame, really, since there were so many things I could have photographed, like the brown haze, the graffiti and The Hisser. Oh well. Since the camera seemed irreparable, I purchased two disposable cameras at the camera shop and finished the rest of my trip looking like white trash. ;-} (It was my first disposable camera and I was unsure what to expect. . .) In any case, we finally arrived at Il Duomo Cathedral and it was everything I imagined it would be! It was big, bright and beautiful! In the cathedral square there were gazillions of people going about their daily lives and just enjoying the sunny but cold weather. There was an ice-skating rink with kiddies skating around in circles and next to that were a gazillion pigeons pecking their lives away at the bread crumbs thrown at them by crowds of adoring onlookers. I, for one, hate pigeons and think they should all be shot and ground into cat food, but it seemed I was in the minority there so I didn't say a word! Amy and I spent an hour or so wandering in and out of the crowds inside and outside the cathedral and then sat down for a while at a cute little café in the Galleria Vittorio Emanuelle covered mall (not a mall in the American sense!) and people-watched as we inhaled the billowing clouds of second-hand smoke encircling us from every other table in the establishment. (I congratulate the City of Los Angeles on having the courage to ban smoking in public places, including bars and clubs back in 1998. . .) After Il Duomo we walked back to La Stazione Cintrale (central train station) and nearly missed our train because I wanted to take yet another "short cut" through town to get there. Fortunately we didn't miss the train and made it back to Switzerland without delay. While on the train Amy got a serious case of motion sickness and felt like harfing the entire time. But there was this really nice elderly Swiss woman who spoke Italian, English, French and German sitting next to us and explained that the problem most likely came from the fact that we were sitting right over the wheels of the train and that if Amy wanted to not be motion sick in the future that we should consider sitting in the middle of the train car next time. We ended up having a nice little conversation about life in Europe and Japan and then said our au revoirs at the Lausanne train station, then Amy and I returned back to our hotel. |
3
January 2000, Milano
Back
to Milan. We got out of the train station and decided to go on a
little stroll and just wonder around wherever our little feet would
take us. There were a couple things that I wanted to see, that I had
first seen in my Italian language textbook at university,
specifically, the castle and Il Duomo cathedral downtown, but other
than those two places, I was open for anything. We began our morning
walk on the long and wide boulevard beginning at the giant central
Milano train station and wandered towards downtown.