Milan, Day 1

A very, very sleepy (and slightly ill) Carrie arrived in Milan today just before noon. Today was our fourth early three hour bus ride transfer, and I’m thankful that it was the last. We’re in Milan tomorrow (Wednesday) and Thursday, and then we’ll head to the airport on Friday morning at 6 am for 31 hours of traveling home.

I didn’t know what I expected Milan to look like, but it wasn’t at all like it actually is. Milan is more city-like than Rome, but still definitely less “city like” than I expected. It’s a big hybrid of modern and historic, and it seems as though a lot of the historic buildings have been repurposed into shopping centers or fancy-schmancy hotels.

We walked straight away to meet our tour guide and made it on time for our 12:30 reservation for the Duomo: the fourth largest church in the world. The outside was magnificent, just like all of the other large Catholic churches we’ve seen in Italy. While all of the churches are so magnificent and beautiful, it’s amazing to experience the differences between each of them.

For example, the Duomo in Milan has no paintings on the inside – it’s all stained glass and sculptures/statues. Whereas the churches in the Vatican had almost every inch painted with ornate and anecdotal paintings. Unfortunately, we did not get to see the inside the Duomo in Florence, but I’ve also heard that’s beautiful. (for reference: duomo essentially means ‘dome’ or ‘cathedral.’)

I’ll drop some pictures here of the inside of the Duomo. The stained glass utterly took my breath away. I’m a sucker for beautiful stained glass, and I wish the sun had been shining so we could have seen the windows in their full glory, but they were still so captivating even without the sun (good stained class often times is).

Gorgeous, right? After visiting the Duomo, we had an hour long break for lunch. Em, Beth, and I stopped at the closest restaurant that had affordable food, and the food was pretty good. For the first time this entire trip, we fell for the bread trap. They put bread on our table and we ate it and got charged for it. We thought we’d be fine because it was uncovered (they told us if we uncovered it we’d get charged), but turns out we got charged. Que será, será.

After lunch, we finished up our walking tour of Milan with our guide. It’s truly a unique city. The main public transportation for locals is a unique bike system where there are just public bikes locked up in different places for people to rent out. Pretty clever! (and very cheap.)

We visited the historic church in Milan, where a man tried to get me to pay for a bracelet by shoving it into me while I was taking a picture (classy). This area of Milan was gorgeous and had a lot of nice, green areas.

After our tour was over, we transferred to our extremely tiny hotel in the Academic area of Milan. The hotel (thank goodness) is way better than the hostels, which is a blessing. That being said, the WiFi is extremely weak and unreliable, so it doesn’t seem like I’ll be having much contact with the outside world, aside from this blog post…if I can even get it up…

We had a group dinner where we were served a dinner of what I think was the Italians being like, “oh look the Americans are here let’s feed them American food.” They handed us large fried patties of what we thought were fish. But we found out later it was chicken…pictured below is Beth’s confused face shining over the breaded mystery meat. At least the fries were good (once we added salt)! Last but not least, my day concluded with a night gelato run, where I got lemon, strawberry, and pomegranate all together. REFRESHING.

Overall, it was a rather easy day, which is nice because tomorrow starts our media visits up again. We’re heading to Burson-Marstellar Milan (an international PR firm) and Rai Milan (Italian TV studio), and it’s going to be a pretty hectic day. The spring in my step is starting to disappear, as is my ability to construct an interesting blog post, so I apologize for the lack of charisma in my writing…(;

Peace + love,

Carrie