Friday was Tonio's birthday so Kiki and I got up early to get him a little breakfast surprise. We bought some fresh bread, some cheese, some apples, some little pastries which we stuck candles in since it was the closest thing to a cake-ish thing we could find at that hour and a bottle of prosecco, with some orange juice of course to make mimosas with ehe. It was a bit of a challenge finding all of it and then trying to get it all into the room without Tonio or anyone else anyone noticing -we weren't exactly allowed to have food and alcohol in the hostel room, ohwell. We woke up Taco and sang happy birthday to Tonio to wake him up and then ate a delicious breakfast and enjoyed the delicious mimosas.
It was another gorgeous sunny day in Milan, the air had a crisp fall feeling to it, it was amazing. We wandered through the streets, passing by lots of old beautiful buildings, high fashion stores, modernized office buildings, caffés, fastfood restaurants and everything else in between. Eventually we ended up in the centre of Milan where the Duomo is. The Duomo is a beautiful old Gothic cathedral right in heart of Milan, it's the biggest tourist attraction of course and is surrounded by a big square and a bunch of nice shopping areas/markets. We wandered around the square for awhile, checking out some of the stores and restaurants, looking for a place to grab some food and some more prosecco, at one of the outdoor patios of one of the restaurants in the square there was a woman sitting at a table with some male friends, she was wearing a fur vest, som really nice jewelry, real leather boots, and a nice dress, she must have easily been wearing $15,000 worth of material on her body, if not more, it was insane, but that's Milan for you. we eventually found a little cafe on the opposite side of the Duomo facing the main facade which was beautiful. Of course being anywhere in the Duomo square is a bit more on the expensive side but you pay for the view right. Later on they opened up the Duomo so we got to go in and wander around for FREE which is always awesome. The interior of the Duomo was gorgeous, as all gothic cathedrals are, I love the stain glass windows, they're so beautifully crafted and detailed, I wish the world still looked more like that.
After the little Duomo exploring we continued walking through the city heading deeper and deeper in the centre/souther part of Milan. We came across another big shopping area, in the one of the small piazzas in the area there was a man playing a guitar, plugged-in with a microphone and all. He was playing Fix You by Coldplay when we approached, one of my favourite songs, so we stopped to watch, he was amazing, his voice was so smooth and yet so powerful, he just moved with the music and played with so much soul, he was in barefeet the entire time as well. We stayed to watch him play awhile longer, taking a walking break, he played Falling Slowly, The Scientist, Words Just Get in the Way and Yellow, I teared up a little at that one not going to lie, not really sure why, just brought back a lot of memories I guess. Anyways, we continued our walk and stumbled upon another big piece of historic Milan, the Castello Sforzesco, a big castle/fortress from way back when. It was big and stone and beautiful, we wandered through there for a little while and then came out the other side where we discovered another beautiful little park and beyond that, an arco di triumfo. By that point we were very far south into the city and our hostel was just north of the city so we decided to turn back because we had quite the hike back up to our end of town.
We wandered through different parts of town on our way back towards our hostel, we found our way into an area of town called Brera which was a kool little area with some nice little restaurants and bars and is known for it's leather working or something like that. We had been searching for a restaurant for Tonio's birthday dinner and found some good options around there. Then we randomly stumbled upon part of the Milan university which was a really beautiful building; courtyards, columns, statues, everything an art history nerd could fall in love with. Seriously, why doesn't Canada look more like that. We stopped for some gelato as we continued our trek back to the hostel, it was DELICIOUS ahhh. I had been craving that for so long. You can't go to Italy and not eat gelato, obviously.
Entrance of Milan Uni
For dinner we went back to Brera and went to a nice little restaurant called New Art, we sat outside on the patio so we could people watch of course. It was a pretty busy little area, we had the perfect waiter, an older, white haired italian man, pretty much everything you image a perfect italian waiter to be. The food was absolutely amazing, we had risotto with mushrooms, real italian carbonera, a mixed salad, a pizza with spinach and prosciutto, another pizza with mushrooms, olives, artichokes, and a ham, and of course some delicious fresh bread with olive oil. And of course a bottle of prosecco to top it all off. Unfortunately I didn't have my camera on me because we were going out partying after dinner but it was one of the best dinners I've ever had. After dinner we went to a street called Curso Como/Via Garibaldi where all the clubs and bars seem to be located and ended up going to a club called Club 11. Was a little expensive to get in but you got a free drink as part of the entrance price at least. It was a pretty nice club, not overly big, dark, sleek interior, the bartenders were good looking as always. The first thing I noticed was how freaking tall the people were there, I'm not kidding. I mean, I know I'm short, obviously, but I have never felt so short in my entire life, probably 70% of the people in that club were 6ft or taller. I guess that's normal when you go to the fashion capital of Italy, everyone is an aspiring model or whatnot. A lot of the people in there definitely came from money too, the girls all looked fabulous and many of the guys were dressed in semi-formal/formal attire. One group must have been there celebrating or something because they kept ordering these buckets which came with full bottles of prosecco and other sorts of alcohol sitting in ice with sparklers attached to them, that one group alone must have ordered about 7 or 8 of them, I don't even want to know how much that cost.
The music wasn't that great, Every single song was a mash-up of two songs, and the music ranged from techno to pop to rap to old school rock'n'roll, at one point there was a mash-up of Wonderwall and Back in Black, it was pretty of odd. Over all definitely an interesting experience.
Curso Como
Saturday it inevitably rained. We were really lucky to get two days of nice weather before the rain hit I suppose since it was november in Italy. We had a pretty lazy day, rain will do that to you, we just went from caffé to bakery to restaurant, wandering our way through town enjoying espressos and yummy carbs, we got back near the main part of town near the Duomo where there's a bunch of shopping mall type things and decided to see if we could find a movie theatre. After asking about 4 different people in italian where the movie theatre was and getting all kinds of unhelpful directions we finally found it! it was a nice movie theatre, very italian and red velvety, we had to buy our tickets together because it was assigned seating which I found kind of odd, I mean you can freely choose your airplane seats but you have assigned seating for a movie? Okay then. The show didn't start for about another hour so we went wandering around the mall/area for awhile. We stopped for gelato, of course you can eat gelato even when it's raining, it was one of those places where you could look at a bunch of the flavours through the window outside the store but had to go inside to order. Kiki didn't seem to notice that there was a glass window protecting the gelato from the outside world and banged her head one it, it was hilarious, and the funniest part was that there was a few italians standing behind her that witnessed the whole thing and were pretty much pointing and laughing at her for a good 10 minutes. That made the rest of us laugh even harder ehehe.
So we saw the new 007 movie Skyfall, the only minor problem with seeing it in Italy was that it was dubbed in Italian without any subtitles. I mean it wasn't too bad since about 60% of Bond movies are just running, shooting, and explosions but I only caught maybe half the dialogue and my friends even less since they speak even less italian that I do. Although I feel like most the movie was visually explanatory anyways so it was fine. I probably will go back and watch it in english eventually because M's sarcasm just didn't translate as well in italian. Also the ending is unbelievable! I won't spoil it for all of you who haven't seen it yet but I was shocked by the ending.
For our last night in Milan we went to this kool restaurant just up the road from our hostel called Capoverde -essentially translates to green cap or green cover, which was fitting since it was attached to a garden/green house kind of thing, it was very earthly and pretty. The restaurant was lovely and the food was delicious, we had a tomato sauce pasta, a couple different kinds of pizza, a red salad, and fresh bread with olive oil and this delicious apply balsamic vinegar, the only problem was that our waiter was horrible. After he took our order he never came back to the table no matter how many times we tried waving him down, he pretty much just avoided our table all together, it wasn't even him who brought our food, it was someone else who worked there, and when we wanted to order bread, forget about it, we actually didn't get the bread until we were almost done our meal and that's because we asked the really nice host guy and he brought it to us within 2 minutes, the only other time we saw our waiter was when he came to clean up our plates, at which point we tried to order more food but he walked away before we could do so, we managed to wave him down once to ask him to bring us 4 shots of limoncello -which was delicious- and that was it, he never even showed up again to give us our check or anything so we ended up just going to the host's desk and paying there. What shitty service, just because we're 20 year olds who aren't native italians doesn't mean you can be such an asshole, he was literally avoiding us.
We had an early flight out the next morning so after dinner just headed back to the hostel and packed up, over all it was a great a trip though :). Italia, ti amo.
Nov. 9-10
Nov. 9-10
No comments:
Post a Comment