Hello all, it's been one hell of a long week to say the least but a great week all the same. It was definitely an exciting week for everyone in North American and a bunch of us here since Tuesday was
the USA presidential election. Because of the time difference it was a pretty late night for those of us out here in Spain who stayed up to watch the election coverage, the results were announced around 5:30am our time, needless to say I was not awake to see the final results be announced.
Pre-election coverage, my friends and I were all studying for midterms at one of our fav restaurants, it was fish & chips night there which was delicious, haven't had real fish & chips in so long. After the excellent dinner and some tasty strawberry trifle, blondie set us up in the back room which was really kool of him. We had a bunch of tables all put together with a couple laptops streaming the election coverage and a dozen bag of chips along with lots of school work all over the them. I left around 2am though, needed to sleep more than I wanted to study/watch election coverage.
Wednesday morning my newsfeed was of course covered in Obama statuses and I was definitely filled with relief and happiness! Obamallamarama! Went to my morning classes but ended up leaving half way through my grammar class, it was painfully slow that day and had lots to do before our trip to Milan. Did a bunch of running around and packing and then met up with the gang at 5pm to head for ze bus station to start our journey to Milan for Tonio's bday!
We caught the 6pm bus from Granada to Malaga and then from Malaga we caught a 10pm flight to Barcelona. In the Malaga airport we were heading through security and Tonio realized that he had left his swiss army knife in his bag, we didn't check any luggage so the woman said he either had to throw it out or check it or mail it back to Granada, Tonio decided to hide it in the airport in a plant instead ahaha. Problem solved.
Our flight from Barcelona to Milan wasn't until 6:30am so we had lots of time to chill in the Barcelona airport that night. Both flights were Ryanair, awful disorganized airline I have to say, the landing on the first flight was rough too, almost thought we had crashed or something it was such a jolt. We tried sleeping near our gate area for awhile but it was honestly so cold I had to get up and walk around and do jumping jacks just to stay warm, I wandered over to the area where all the cafés and restaurants are, they were all closed but it was a lot warmer over there for some reason, eventually I found a couch type thing over there and crashed there for awhile. At 6am we started getting ready to board, when we got to the front of the line they told us that we needed our tickets to be stamped by Ryanair before we could get on the plane..are you serious? I guess it was kind of our fault because on our first Ryanair flight we had to get our tickets stamped too but since this was our connecting flight we never even thought about it because we never left the gate area once we had arrived in Barcelona airport. So we literally had to run out of the gate area into the main terminal, find the bloody Ryanair desk, get them to stamp our tickets and then run back through security and to our gate, luckily we had talked to the Ryanair people so they waited for us to show up but it was really tight, by some miracle we actually made it onto that flight and it still left more or less on time. I just about had a heart/asthma attack by the time I made it there though, we pretty much ran the entire length of the airport. Stupid Ryanair.
Thursday Morning we Finally got into Milan, of course the first thing we did was go find a caffé. We came across some fancy looking art caffé and went inside, turns out it was more a restaurant that was just opening, it was only like 10am after all, the owners didn't exactly thrilled when we walked in but whatever. The owners and all the workers were asian which was a little weird, I'm still not quite used to spanish and italian-speaking asians, asians really do run things everywhere in world. We all got our first espresso shots of the trip -there was many more to come- and then went out in search of some breaky. We found this amazing little bread shop and bought some focaccia bread, this spinach bread, an apple strudel and this apple blossom thing, all so delicious! I think the focaccia bread from there was the best we had all trip. Then we went in search of our hostel, Hostel California (welcome to the ho(s)tel california...) it was on this street called via Lambrate, you wouldn't think it would be that hard to find, well apparently there's also a whole little area of town called Lambrate, needless to say we were lost as hell for awhile, we had looked it up on google maps before leaving Spain but we didn't have any real directions or even a map of milan upon arrival. Eventually we used one of our phones to googlemap it, there's definitely no way in hell we would have found it on our own, it was tucked away on this small little side street.
When we finally found the hostel and went up hoping we could check in right away although our check-in time was 11am and it was just past 11am by the time we got there, knowing how europe works we weren't that hopeful that our room would be ready. The guy at the front desk was a little sketchy, he told us they needed 10 more minutes to clean the room and that we could go chill upstairs, there was a little kitchen area on the 3rd floor, so we went and sat there for a bit. After going back about 15 minutes later he told us they needed another 20 minutes or so, of course, so we just went café down the street and got another espresso. Eventually our room was ready, the guy wanted a copy of all our passports and a room deposit and all this stuff before giving us the key, which was this old school, harry potter looking thing, it was quite the process. The dude gave off such a weird vibe, I don't know. To get to our room we had to go up this spiral staircase which was kind of kool and it was like a little attic room with 6 beds in it, not gunna lie it was a pretty sweet room, especially for a hostel, we even had our own private bathroom. We dropped all our stuff off there and headed for the city.
We did acquire a map so we had some idea of where we were going, we were all exhausted so we just took it slow and wandered through the city most of the afternoon. We spent most of our time on this main street that leads down into the centre of the city called Buenas Aires, a lot of the shopping and commercial kind of places are there like H&M, Pull and Bear, Zara, etc. plus lots of restaurants and fastfood places like BK and McD's (eww.) Wandering through the streets we stumbled upon this fancy looking theatre and there happened to be a Dance Fusion Show on that night, we wandered in to check it out and ended up buying tickets.. Front row tickets, for like 27 euros. On our wander we found some really sweet bread and meat shops and got some real prosciutto which was absolutely delicious, along with more focaccia bread and some yummy olive bread too. We wandered through one of the big public gardens too which were beautiful, it wasn't really a garden but more of a park, the leaves were turning red and yellow, there was a duck pond and old statues on mossy rock faces, it was beautiful. Definitely one thing I miss while being in Granada, there isn't much greener here and therefore the seasonal colour changing is fairly absent.
Later that night we got our first taste of real Italian pizza and then headed for the show. It was in this beautiful theatre covered in red velvet and mahogany, highlighted with gold. We were literally sitting in the centre of the front row, it was amazing. It was quite an artistic, interesting dance show. There was 8/10 dancers that performed a serious of dances of all varieties, some were quite contemporary and abstract, then there was one that was a tango fusion, another very ballet-based one, etc. It was pretty incredible, one of the dancers were absolutely amazing. The one male dancer though was so ripped you could see almost every vein in his entire body..I'm not even kidding, it was kind of gross, I've never seen anyone that ripped in my entire life. After the dance performance we ended up at this bar called Swiss Corner, it was a trendy little place, glass windows all around the outside, very pink lighting with artistic images of famous peoples faces on the walls. Not the most italian place, but a very kool place all the same. We got mojitos and crepes (both sweet and savoury), all of which were delicious. We had fun conversing with our waiter Roberto, at first we tried speaking italian with him but eventually we flipped into spanish and as it turned out he also spoke spanish, he was a kool italian guy and am attractive one at that ehe.
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