The night before we left for Milan was an interesting one. Our room we were staying in…very small. There were two twin beds pushed together, and a cot at the foot of them. Luckily we were only staying there one night, as there was barely any room for all of us + our luggage. A little after midnight, I was still up writing a blog post and working. The room was quiet, dark and very peaceful. This was abruptly changed when a fire alarm started to go off. Megan and I looked at each other puzzled, and headed out into the hallway. At this point, others had began to filter into the hallway, equally confused. However, after a few moments, it stopped. We all shrugged it off to maybe someone accidentally went out the fire exit and it was a fluke. Megan and I went back in our room, sat down on our beds only to hear the fire alarm start again. We ran back out to the hallway still looking for some sort of answer as to what was happening. Again, it turned off after a few more moments. I had tried calling the front desk to make sure we were okay to go back to bed, but they didn’t answer and I was tired so we forgot about it. Luckily, it didn’t go off again and we were able to get some sleep.
Just like most mornings, we woke up early the next morning and had breakfast in our hotel. We were on the road by 7:30 and headed for Milan. Once arriving, we met our tour guide for the day, Simone. He started out with a small introduction to Milan and then we entered the Duomo.
He walked us through the history of the stain glass and also showed us how the light comes through and shines on horoscopes that are on the floor. Everything about this building was amazing.
After the Duomo, we had time to get lunch on our own. The veg heads (Kimmie, Francesca and I) found a nice juice bar with small snacks. I got a bean salad which had kidney beans, legumes, peas, black beans, chickpeas and parsley. I also got a strawberry smoothie. The combination of the salad and smoothie was perfect, as I was really craving something fresh.
Once we met after lunch, we continued our walking tour of the city. We got to see a very interesting statue which (obviously) had some negative reactions at first. However, if you try to remove the statue now, the people of the city won’t let you! They love it now.
The last stop was the castle. I was excited to learn that there used to be a moat, and that the grass level was were the water once was.
There were also cats down in the moat! Apparently, the only person allowed in and out of the moat is the woman who feeds the cats and tends to them. How cute!
Afterwards, we went to our final hotel for the trip. We were ecstatic to find out that the original four of us who had roomed together in Rome were reunited for our final nights in Milan. We had a little bit of free time before we had to meet in the lobby for dinner, but I wanted to relax in the room since it wasn’t that much time.
Once we were done with dinner, we headed back to the hotel and just hung out for the night. The next day was when our media visits started again, so we had a long day ahead of us!