Ciao Milano
27 June, 12:35am
Well, I'm safe in Milano today. Yesterday was a long day and I didn't have time to write anything, but today was much more laid back. It was definitely good to have a day to wind down after our trip here.
Saturday morning I met some friends from the program and we went to the internet cafe to do some research into how to get to the hotel. The original plan was that Adrian was going to meet us all at 3 or 4pm, I can't remember which, and we would all travel together to Milan via train. Once there we were going to take cabs from the train station to the hotel. Courtney and Sarah had a horror story when they were in Florence before the class where their taxi was 40 euro or so, which is ridiculous, and that they had charged per person and per bag. What we found out later is that they called their hotel to get that taxi and it made a special trip to come get them, so we think this is an unusual situation and usually the cabs are about 15 euros for the trip.
We found out the closest subway stop, and I drew a map from the subway station to the hotel, which didn't look too far on mapquest. I looked up ticket information, and it appeared that Adrian had thought the first class price was the regular price, so she overestimated the cost by about 15 euros. We called Adriane's cell and made sure we could get into the hotel and we would be ok not meeting her. We decided to meet back at Gianni's and decide then when we'd leave. Everything was set. I spent a little more time in the internet cafe and walked back.
It's sad I didn't have more time to look around. I can't recall if I mentioned it, but Friday was a festival day with what was lots of stalls of Italian craftspeople and some antique dealers. Saturday it was market day, which is every Saturday, and it's nuts. It's as if you took the entire contents of a Wal-Mart and broke it into pieces to put in little stalls. Literally everything you could find at a Wal-Mart was there, and a lot of fresh food on top of that.
We met up and decided we'd try to take the 1:20pm train since we didn't want to get into Milan so late that we couldn't go out and do something. That gave us a bit of time to clean up our apartments and get our last minute packing done. I ran into Adrian and went over exactly who was going and what we were doing, and she was very supportive of us being independent and striking out on our own.
We met at the train station, and figured out in broken Italian how to get the tickets at the bigleteria, or ticket booth. The man spoke no English but we knew enough Italian between us to get through it. We didn't have much time - we had met one another at about ten til 1pm and the train physically leaves at 1:20 usually, but we got the tickets taken care of and made it on time alright. Myself included there were nine of us, about half of our group, which is 19 including Adrian. Since there were 8 girls and everyone had really heavy luggage I had to do a lot of lifting the bags up to the storage above, but once I had explained to them that we couldn't just leave the bags blocking the doorways we were fine.
The train runs from San Giovanni into Florence, where you switch to a different train that goes to Milan. The train station is big and open air - pigeons live there, though not many. There are a couple boards with departure and arrival times, and a bunch of food and miscellaneous stalls. We found our track number and got ready to board it. We decided to try and go forward as far as we could because it was looking crowded. We got into the train and started moving but there were no empty rooms. The kind of train we were riding has little rooms for six people with a door and glass enclosing. After several periods of standing and doing nothing finally we just split into different rooms. I had to sit out in the hallway on my luggage for a little bit until some of the girls squeezed into a couple seats so that I could take the broken chair in their room.
There was a guy who spoke a bit of English, but not too much. He was nice, about 23. A bunch of kids were there too, all around 17, and they were sort of a cross between gutter punks and ravers. Well in that they acted like gutter punks but they were going to an outdoor electronic music festival in Bologna. It was pretty cramped and they were pretty obnoxious, but we made it alright until Bologna, where the train mostly cleared out. I moved my luggage into a room and checked on everyone. It turns out a painting professor from NABA was in one of the cars with three of the girls. Since the rooms didn't really have enough space for six people's luggage, we split up three to a room mostly. The rest of the ride was easy and before we knew it we were in Milan.
The professor had said he would help us to navigate the subway, and he told us a few things but they were things I already knew. He was trying to explain that we could get the tickets at the counter of a news seller, but either I didn't understand his English or no one thought to mention that he had said this to me. So we descended into the subway. Hardly any of the girls were strong enough to carry their heavy baggage by the handle, so every time we'd go up and down steps there would be a lot of clomping and a few times the suitcases tumbled down the stairs. But we made it in ok.
Now, I had ridden the subway before, and the nice Pakistani man I mentioned before had done my ticket for me. I should have paid attention to which button he pressed, because there are about 15 different buttons labelled in Italian and it's not entirely clear which you need to press. I went over to a machine on my own to try and figure it out and I was looking at it for a moment.
Two young Italian girls were in front, and they came over and asked if I needed help in English. They were very eager to help and I remembered the Pakistani man from before. One asked me where I needed to go and I had to look it up, at which time she started naming off stops it could be. The stop is called Abbiategrasso (a bit hard to remember if you ask me) and once they knew this they argued a little about how much it would cost, and finally settled on one euro. The one girl pointed to the large bill accepter for me to put my money in, and at this point I began to suspect something a little shady. I checked but I did not have enough pocket change to cover the cost, so I had no choice but to use a 10 euro bill. I carefully got it out and put it into the accepter and was trying to figure out where the money would come out. I looked below but it wasn't there, and I realized one girl was standing in front of a recessed area like the kind in snack machines, so that I wouldn't see it, with her hand inside it. I nudged her out of the way and got all the change as quick as I could, to which she acted very indignant. They then asked for change so I gave her a coin to get rid of them.
I got my group together and made sure everyone had one euro coins to use so that they wouldn't have to break large bills, and a few at a time we went over, while I made sure someone held onto my wallet over by our group. The two girls had left so we were alright, but it left me paranoid for a while. We figured out which subway to get in pretty easily since our stop was the last on the green line, and boarded the subway. It wasn't too terribly crowded and it was only about 5 minutes before we were at Abbiategrasso. We got the bags up to where the exit was but the walk up the steps was pretty challenging for people who were used to dragging their heavy bags on wheels. I had to make about 5 trips to get all the luggage that they couldn't carry and get it up on the street.
We checked out a map before leaving the station and it started to look a good bit further than I had been planning on. Everyone was exhausted, not the least of which was myself. There is a small train, like a trolley, that runs by the subway station and a helpful Italian man had told Louisa it was too far to walk and they should take the train. He said it was the third or fourth stop, he wasn't sure, and occasionally it didn't stop at the stop, which was worrying to say the least. We found a sign for the Arcobalena, our hotel, which said it was 1.3km away, which is about three quarters of a mile. Some of us felt like we could handle the walk, but a few people were really exhausted so we went down and bought tickets for it for a Euro and caught the train. Ferrai made sure to be near the front and asked the driver what to do who thankfully was really nice and spoke some English. He told us he'd tell us when to get off and make sure to stop. It's sort of like the NYC bus system where you have to ring when you need to make a stop. Anyway we hit the stop and it was just a hop skip and jump to the hotel.
Some of us took quick showers and go eat and others decided to go to the grocery store, which was closing relatively soon, at 9pm as always. No 24 hour groceries here! Six of us went to eat, and we followed the concierge's directions to a trattoria nearby. A trattoria is supposedly more reasonable in price and more reflective of the cuisine of the area. The waiter barely spoke any English and we had a bit of trouble figuring out if we could order separately but he brought us a tourist menu so we knew what we could get. I ordered a kind of corkscrew pasta in a sauce of zucca e salsiccia, which is pumpkin and sausage. It sounded crazy, and it looked a little crazy too, but damn if it didn't taste pretty good actually. I had heard pumpkin was a local specialty and I wanted to try it. Everyone liked mine although most of them were not as thrilled with their own selections. However we did all get desert and everyone loved it. My gelato was some of the best I've ever had.
Over by the trattoria was this place we kept trying to figure out the nature of. It was sort of like a bowling alley in atmosphere with video games, a bar (well this is Italy you know) and a pizzeria, or greasy spoon if you will. Only there were no bowling lanes, just long areas sectioned off by short pieces of wood, like boxes and score keeping equipmant. We thought we saw signs referring to dancing but really we had no idea.
Our hotel, Arcobaleno, or rainbow in Italian, is in the shape of a rainbow, albeit a flat one. The rooms are pretty nice and we get kitchenettes although my burners don't work. There's a gym, although no pool, no ice machine (although we have frdges in our rooms), no pop machines, and the bar only stays open until 11pm even on Saturday night. The neighborhood seems way on the outskirts of Milan and a little rough though not terribly. Graffitti everywhere, but not so bad oheriwise. It's a good 10 or 15-minute walk to anytihng interesting, or we can take the train, which I now understand is free unless you're unlucky enough to get checked and then fined, which is 25 Euros.
After dinner a few of us split a bottle of wine from downstairs in the bar, which was expensive (about $12 US) but so good it made up for the price. After that we had wanted to get more wine but nowhere was open after midnight...on a Saturday night! So we just broke into the wine some of us had bought from the Chianti Winery.
Today there wasn't much to speak of. I went to the grocery store and bought some food, and later went on a walk downtown with a few friends. We tried to find a working internet cafe but couldn't, as we had left after 8pm and everything is closed by 9. Tonight it was just getting ready for tomorrow - we're meeting Adrian in the lobby at 8am.
Oh I almost forgot! Guess what happened to the people who met Adriane Well, they asked if they needed tickets before and she pooh-poohed them but bought one herself. They went in and tried to get tickets from the same conductor we dealt with and he said they couldn't get any tickets until 3 hours later. I guess Adrian had made plans to meet some friends in Milan, so instead of buying a new ticket she just left them all. They had to fend for themselves, but not even with the level of preparation we had. I am just so glad we decided to go on our own, it sounded like a catastrophe. Only the taxi issue wasn't so bad, their taxis were all around 10. Anyway, I'm getting sleepy and I have to be ready for my first day of class. I should get internet in the design lab and I'm excited about that too.
Well, I'm safe in Milano today. Yesterday was a long day and I didn't have time to write anything, but today was much more laid back. It was definitely good to have a day to wind down after our trip here.
Saturday morning I met some friends from the program and we went to the internet cafe to do some research into how to get to the hotel. The original plan was that Adrian was going to meet us all at 3 or 4pm, I can't remember which, and we would all travel together to Milan via train. Once there we were going to take cabs from the train station to the hotel. Courtney and Sarah had a horror story when they were in Florence before the class where their taxi was 40 euro or so, which is ridiculous, and that they had charged per person and per bag. What we found out later is that they called their hotel to get that taxi and it made a special trip to come get them, so we think this is an unusual situation and usually the cabs are about 15 euros for the trip.
We found out the closest subway stop, and I drew a map from the subway station to the hotel, which didn't look too far on mapquest. I looked up ticket information, and it appeared that Adrian had thought the first class price was the regular price, so she overestimated the cost by about 15 euros. We called Adriane's cell and made sure we could get into the hotel and we would be ok not meeting her. We decided to meet back at Gianni's and decide then when we'd leave. Everything was set. I spent a little more time in the internet cafe and walked back.
It's sad I didn't have more time to look around. I can't recall if I mentioned it, but Friday was a festival day with what was lots of stalls of Italian craftspeople and some antique dealers. Saturday it was market day, which is every Saturday, and it's nuts. It's as if you took the entire contents of a Wal-Mart and broke it into pieces to put in little stalls. Literally everything you could find at a Wal-Mart was there, and a lot of fresh food on top of that.
We met up and decided we'd try to take the 1:20pm train since we didn't want to get into Milan so late that we couldn't go out and do something. That gave us a bit of time to clean up our apartments and get our last minute packing done. I ran into Adrian and went over exactly who was going and what we were doing, and she was very supportive of us being independent and striking out on our own.
We met at the train station, and figured out in broken Italian how to get the tickets at the bigleteria, or ticket booth. The man spoke no English but we knew enough Italian between us to get through it. We didn't have much time - we had met one another at about ten til 1pm and the train physically leaves at 1:20 usually, but we got the tickets taken care of and made it on time alright. Myself included there were nine of us, about half of our group, which is 19 including Adrian. Since there were 8 girls and everyone had really heavy luggage I had to do a lot of lifting the bags up to the storage above, but once I had explained to them that we couldn't just leave the bags blocking the doorways we were fine.
The train runs from San Giovanni into Florence, where you switch to a different train that goes to Milan. The train station is big and open air - pigeons live there, though not many. There are a couple boards with departure and arrival times, and a bunch of food and miscellaneous stalls. We found our track number and got ready to board it. We decided to try and go forward as far as we could because it was looking crowded. We got into the train and started moving but there were no empty rooms. The kind of train we were riding has little rooms for six people with a door and glass enclosing. After several periods of standing and doing nothing finally we just split into different rooms. I had to sit out in the hallway on my luggage for a little bit until some of the girls squeezed into a couple seats so that I could take the broken chair in their room.
There was a guy who spoke a bit of English, but not too much. He was nice, about 23. A bunch of kids were there too, all around 17, and they were sort of a cross between gutter punks and ravers. Well in that they acted like gutter punks but they were going to an outdoor electronic music festival in Bologna. It was pretty cramped and they were pretty obnoxious, but we made it alright until Bologna, where the train mostly cleared out. I moved my luggage into a room and checked on everyone. It turns out a painting professor from NABA was in one of the cars with three of the girls. Since the rooms didn't really have enough space for six people's luggage, we split up three to a room mostly. The rest of the ride was easy and before we knew it we were in Milan.
The professor had said he would help us to navigate the subway, and he told us a few things but they were things I already knew. He was trying to explain that we could get the tickets at the counter of a news seller, but either I didn't understand his English or no one thought to mention that he had said this to me. So we descended into the subway. Hardly any of the girls were strong enough to carry their heavy baggage by the handle, so every time we'd go up and down steps there would be a lot of clomping and a few times the suitcases tumbled down the stairs. But we made it in ok.
Now, I had ridden the subway before, and the nice Pakistani man I mentioned before had done my ticket for me. I should have paid attention to which button he pressed, because there are about 15 different buttons labelled in Italian and it's not entirely clear which you need to press. I went over to a machine on my own to try and figure it out and I was looking at it for a moment.
Two young Italian girls were in front, and they came over and asked if I needed help in English. They were very eager to help and I remembered the Pakistani man from before. One asked me where I needed to go and I had to look it up, at which time she started naming off stops it could be. The stop is called Abbiategrasso (a bit hard to remember if you ask me) and once they knew this they argued a little about how much it would cost, and finally settled on one euro. The one girl pointed to the large bill accepter for me to put my money in, and at this point I began to suspect something a little shady. I checked but I did not have enough pocket change to cover the cost, so I had no choice but to use a 10 euro bill. I carefully got it out and put it into the accepter and was trying to figure out where the money would come out. I looked below but it wasn't there, and I realized one girl was standing in front of a recessed area like the kind in snack machines, so that I wouldn't see it, with her hand inside it. I nudged her out of the way and got all the change as quick as I could, to which she acted very indignant. They then asked for change so I gave her a coin to get rid of them.
I got my group together and made sure everyone had one euro coins to use so that they wouldn't have to break large bills, and a few at a time we went over, while I made sure someone held onto my wallet over by our group. The two girls had left so we were alright, but it left me paranoid for a while. We figured out which subway to get in pretty easily since our stop was the last on the green line, and boarded the subway. It wasn't too terribly crowded and it was only about 5 minutes before we were at Abbiategrasso. We got the bags up to where the exit was but the walk up the steps was pretty challenging for people who were used to dragging their heavy bags on wheels. I had to make about 5 trips to get all the luggage that they couldn't carry and get it up on the street.
We checked out a map before leaving the station and it started to look a good bit further than I had been planning on. Everyone was exhausted, not the least of which was myself. There is a small train, like a trolley, that runs by the subway station and a helpful Italian man had told Louisa it was too far to walk and they should take the train. He said it was the third or fourth stop, he wasn't sure, and occasionally it didn't stop at the stop, which was worrying to say the least. We found a sign for the Arcobalena, our hotel, which said it was 1.3km away, which is about three quarters of a mile. Some of us felt like we could handle the walk, but a few people were really exhausted so we went down and bought tickets for it for a Euro and caught the train. Ferrai made sure to be near the front and asked the driver what to do who thankfully was really nice and spoke some English. He told us he'd tell us when to get off and make sure to stop. It's sort of like the NYC bus system where you have to ring when you need to make a stop. Anyway we hit the stop and it was just a hop skip and jump to the hotel.
Some of us took quick showers and go eat and others decided to go to the grocery store, which was closing relatively soon, at 9pm as always. No 24 hour groceries here! Six of us went to eat, and we followed the concierge's directions to a trattoria nearby. A trattoria is supposedly more reasonable in price and more reflective of the cuisine of the area. The waiter barely spoke any English and we had a bit of trouble figuring out if we could order separately but he brought us a tourist menu so we knew what we could get. I ordered a kind of corkscrew pasta in a sauce of zucca e salsiccia, which is pumpkin and sausage. It sounded crazy, and it looked a little crazy too, but damn if it didn't taste pretty good actually. I had heard pumpkin was a local specialty and I wanted to try it. Everyone liked mine although most of them were not as thrilled with their own selections. However we did all get desert and everyone loved it. My gelato was some of the best I've ever had.
Over by the trattoria was this place we kept trying to figure out the nature of. It was sort of like a bowling alley in atmosphere with video games, a bar (well this is Italy you know) and a pizzeria, or greasy spoon if you will. Only there were no bowling lanes, just long areas sectioned off by short pieces of wood, like boxes and score keeping equipmant. We thought we saw signs referring to dancing but really we had no idea.
Our hotel, Arcobaleno, or rainbow in Italian, is in the shape of a rainbow, albeit a flat one. The rooms are pretty nice and we get kitchenettes although my burners don't work. There's a gym, although no pool, no ice machine (although we have frdges in our rooms), no pop machines, and the bar only stays open until 11pm even on Saturday night. The neighborhood seems way on the outskirts of Milan and a little rough though not terribly. Graffitti everywhere, but not so bad oheriwise. It's a good 10 or 15-minute walk to anytihng interesting, or we can take the train, which I now understand is free unless you're unlucky enough to get checked and then fined, which is 25 Euros.
After dinner a few of us split a bottle of wine from downstairs in the bar, which was expensive (about $12 US) but so good it made up for the price. After that we had wanted to get more wine but nowhere was open after midnight...on a Saturday night! So we just broke into the wine some of us had bought from the Chianti Winery.
Today there wasn't much to speak of. I went to the grocery store and bought some food, and later went on a walk downtown with a few friends. We tried to find a working internet cafe but couldn't, as we had left after 8pm and everything is closed by 9. Tonight it was just getting ready for tomorrow - we're meeting Adrian in the lobby at 8am.
Oh I almost forgot! Guess what happened to the people who met Adriane Well, they asked if they needed tickets before and she pooh-poohed them but bought one herself. They went in and tried to get tickets from the same conductor we dealt with and he said they couldn't get any tickets until 3 hours later. I guess Adrian had made plans to meet some friends in Milan, so instead of buying a new ticket she just left them all. They had to fend for themselves, but not even with the level of preparation we had. I am just so glad we decided to go on our own, it sounded like a catastrophe. Only the taxi issue wasn't so bad, their taxis were all around 10. Anyway, I'm getting sleepy and I have to be ready for my first day of class. I should get internet in the design lab and I'm excited about that too.
posted by Brian at 12:35 AM
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home