Milano Madness

This past weekend two friends and I took a weekend journey to Milan. And yes, journey is the right word. We left Saturday morning and got to the city around 2:30 after taking two separate trains. After walking about an hour from the train station, we were of coursed amazed by the duomo. There are no pictures that can do it justice. Honestly. I tried, and I’m sure that they don’t compare. We then walked around for a while, went into a few stores, and found a restaurant where we ate dinner and I watched the Dutch play their first game in the Euro Cup. After that, we made our trek to the hostel.

Oh, the hostel. Not only did they say that they had changed our reservation (which had accidentally been made for the wrong day), but it started pouring rain right as we got there. The person at the desk call another hostel and said we could stay there for the night. So we were driven there by some random person we had never met in Milan’s worst thunderstorm basically ever. Needless to say, we were pretty freaked out. We were put in a room with two Czech guys who were actually pretty cool, and did not seem like the type to steal our stuff, so that made me feel a little better. I didn’t sleep very well, because the bed wasn’t very comfortable, but it was loud.

The next morning, we decided to walk to the Pinocoteca di Brera which is one of the best art museums in the city. Little did we know that this was over an hour and a half walk away from where we were and that it was going to start pouring again. I’m just glad we all had an umbrella; otherwise we would’ve been completely miserable. The Pinocoteca was really cool though, lots of paintings of Jesus and whatnot. We also stopped by the castle where two Africans were very persistent on getting money from us. We handled that just by walking away. Then we made our way back to the train station for another adventure to Parma.

We had looked at the train schedules before we left and knew that we had to take two trains. But we did not know that we wouldn’t be able to by the ticket for the second one at the other train station. This meant a few minutes of freaking out, because we didn’t think we’d be able to buy tickets (and in Italy, if you don’t have a ticket, you get a HUGE fine). But a random guy at the station told us that we could buy the tickets on the train and it’d be fine (BONUS: that all happened in Italian! Yay learning stuff!)

We got to Parma, and everything was closed, but it was a really cute city just to see. Not too big, but it had some interesting buildings and shops to look at. After all that, we head back to Ferrara without a hitch. An exhausting weekend for sure.

What up da Vinci?

You can see the some of the stained glass from outside in the evening

Parma! Meat and cheese galore!

Also- before all that, we had a pasta-making lesson on Wednesday. I didn’t get to take pictures of the process, because my hands were covered in pasta-stuffs, but here’s a picture of the final product! And yes, it was delicious.