Milano and time out for injury
I said in an earlier post that I went straight from Venice to Florence, which is actually not true, I went to Venice to Milano for 3 nights, so if you're hanging out for religious iconography and renaissance art, you'll have to wait for another post.
The train system in Italy is fantastic. I'd been warned by (italian speaking) friends that the trains were woeful, but I found them not only the cleanest, cheapest and most on time, but also the easiest to use.
On the morning I was training it from Venice to Milano an American guy was going absolutely spare as the self-service ticket machine he was using was having a moment and would only accept coins. As I'd managed to negotiate my way around the machine next to his in no time flat, I tried to be helpful and assist him and somehow managed to make things worse. He was intending to get to Rome in the day and needed to be on the 10.54 train but was buying his tickets at 10.52, so didn't have a lot of time to spare. As he became increasingly rude about the inanimate machine (and the italian rail system) I basically decided that he should have been more organised and so opted out of any attempts to continue helping to the point that when he said, hopefully "maybe the trains run late?" I took great pleasure in saying "it's italy mate. The trains run on time, remember Mussolini?"
Anyway, he didn't make his train and so was "stuck in Venice" for another hour and a half. The train station is opposite the grand canal, so in terms of being stuck anywhere, not a bad location quite frankly. So I didn't have a lot of sympathy for him.
I, however made my train no worries, as I am completely and utterly organised!
The trip to Milan was lovely and by my reckoning I think to get there I would have gone over one of the spurs of the Dolomite mountain range. I could be wrong and am open to any geographical wizard to tell me so.
Milan, itself, isn't a great place. It's a business city, and where I stayed could have pretty much been any city. The original part of the city, of which there is only a very small part, was amazing, but all in all, the city is filled with office blocks and department stores. The city does contain one of the oldest gothic churches in Italy with more than some enormous amount of spires, which was nice, and I do have a photo somewhere, so will upload that at some stage I guess.
But other than that, the only reason you would go to Milan is to shop. Which as a backpacker with no room to carry anything additional was entirely pointless.
I did manage to sprain my ankle quite badly, hearing the tear of the tendon as I landed with a graceful "thump" on a street filled with potholes. But as it was the opposite ankle to my already hurting knee it sort of balanced out my limp. It also meant that I had to spend an entire day in bed with an ice pack on my foot watching MTV (the only english language show on my motel TV). Honestly, the italian language home shopping network shows provided more entertainment to me.
The first motel I stayed in was relatively close to the train station, and so on my first evening when I came back to the motel after wandering around for a few hours, I was standing outside the building smoking when I seriously think a guy presumed I was a prostitute! He gave me an odd look and flashed me some cash, which was enough to send me scarpering back to my room and spur me onto finding a new place the next day.
As for Milan being the fashion capital of the world, that may well be, but when it's 38 degrees by 10am (no idea what that is in farenheit... lots I guess) I can assure you that no one looks fashionable. They all look fairly sweaty, a little bit crumpled and mostly just hot, which kind of made me feel good, as I had a pack filled with cargos, singlet tops and that was about it.
I also had the worst meals of my life in Milan. Hands down, and I went to a boarding school were the meals more often resembled something from a Dickensian novel than anything else, so I can speak with confidence about bad food. One meal of some kind of pasta (mmmm mystery pasta) had been microwaved to well past normal and was served to me looking like a post apocolyptic war image. All in all, not good.
So, while it was a pretty train trip, all in all Milan isn't a place I'd recommend to anyone.
The train system in Italy is fantastic. I'd been warned by (italian speaking) friends that the trains were woeful, but I found them not only the cleanest, cheapest and most on time, but also the easiest to use.
On the morning I was training it from Venice to Milano an American guy was going absolutely spare as the self-service ticket machine he was using was having a moment and would only accept coins. As I'd managed to negotiate my way around the machine next to his in no time flat, I tried to be helpful and assist him and somehow managed to make things worse. He was intending to get to Rome in the day and needed to be on the 10.54 train but was buying his tickets at 10.52, so didn't have a lot of time to spare. As he became increasingly rude about the inanimate machine (and the italian rail system) I basically decided that he should have been more organised and so opted out of any attempts to continue helping to the point that when he said, hopefully "maybe the trains run late?" I took great pleasure in saying "it's italy mate. The trains run on time, remember Mussolini?"
Anyway, he didn't make his train and so was "stuck in Venice" for another hour and a half. The train station is opposite the grand canal, so in terms of being stuck anywhere, not a bad location quite frankly. So I didn't have a lot of sympathy for him.
I, however made my train no worries, as I am completely and utterly organised!
The trip to Milan was lovely and by my reckoning I think to get there I would have gone over one of the spurs of the Dolomite mountain range. I could be wrong and am open to any geographical wizard to tell me so.
Milan, itself, isn't a great place. It's a business city, and where I stayed could have pretty much been any city. The original part of the city, of which there is only a very small part, was amazing, but all in all, the city is filled with office blocks and department stores. The city does contain one of the oldest gothic churches in Italy with more than some enormous amount of spires, which was nice, and I do have a photo somewhere, so will upload that at some stage I guess.
But other than that, the only reason you would go to Milan is to shop. Which as a backpacker with no room to carry anything additional was entirely pointless.
I did manage to sprain my ankle quite badly, hearing the tear of the tendon as I landed with a graceful "thump" on a street filled with potholes. But as it was the opposite ankle to my already hurting knee it sort of balanced out my limp. It also meant that I had to spend an entire day in bed with an ice pack on my foot watching MTV (the only english language show on my motel TV). Honestly, the italian language home shopping network shows provided more entertainment to me.
The first motel I stayed in was relatively close to the train station, and so on my first evening when I came back to the motel after wandering around for a few hours, I was standing outside the building smoking when I seriously think a guy presumed I was a prostitute! He gave me an odd look and flashed me some cash, which was enough to send me scarpering back to my room and spur me onto finding a new place the next day.
As for Milan being the fashion capital of the world, that may well be, but when it's 38 degrees by 10am (no idea what that is in farenheit... lots I guess) I can assure you that no one looks fashionable. They all look fairly sweaty, a little bit crumpled and mostly just hot, which kind of made me feel good, as I had a pack filled with cargos, singlet tops and that was about it.
I also had the worst meals of my life in Milan. Hands down, and I went to a boarding school were the meals more often resembled something from a Dickensian novel than anything else, so I can speak with confidence about bad food. One meal of some kind of pasta (mmmm mystery pasta) had been microwaved to well past normal and was served to me looking like a post apocolyptic war image. All in all, not good.
So, while it was a pretty train trip, all in all Milan isn't a place I'd recommend to anyone.
