Photos
Italy 2005
Milan
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Milan |
Alitalia flight AZ 619 (with Shivani and I in it) landed at the Malpensa airport in Milan at 7am on January 1st, 2005. We were pretty well prepared: we knew exactly how we were going to spend that day, and indeed the next five days in Italy. We had read the guides, had the right information, and the right attitude.
We were stopping in Italy on our way to India, and had four large suitcases. These we checked in at the left luggage counter, at the price of €3 per piece per day (no credit cards). Then we bravely bought tickets for the Malpensa Express bus (€22 round trip) and started our one hour journey to Milan. The bus dropped us off at the main railway station (Milano centrale) at about 9am. We had arrived in Italy.
And we hit a snag rightaway: it was the first of January, and
everything was closed. We had planned to spend the day looking
at the sights in Milan, and then catch the evening train to Venice.
We were prepared to be a little disoriented, but we couldn't even
find the ticket window. And everyone who I stopped to ask didn't
speak any english and didn't know what we were talking about. I
finally went to a room that called itself the information
office, where a nice english speaking lady told us where the ticket
window was -- outside the station. When we got to the ticket
office, it was closed; the notice said it would open at 10am. We
were in a strange foreign city, with unclear plans. It was cold,
and we had a 30 minute wait. In this photo, the tension on
Shivani's face is palpable.
After buying our train tickets to Venice, we made an attempt to
ride the Milan subway. We wanted to buy a daily subway pass,
but nobody seemed to know anything about those. The ticket
windows at the metro station were not open, and our guidebooks
had said that we could buy tickets at most bookstores/cigarette
shops. However, the cigarette shop in the station had no idea
about a daily pass, even when I asked in my best Italian. We
even tried asking a couple of police officers, but despite their
beautiful shiny uniforms, they had no idea what we were talking
about either. We decided to bite the bullet and buy one-way
tickets from the ticket vending machines, but there was an
impediment here too: the english in the ticket vending machines
was utterly unintelligible. We were floundering around, as were
a few other tourists, when we noticed that there was a chappy
hanging out at the station who was helping out hapless travelers
like us. Just as I was feeling thankful for his presence, the
details of the deal became clear: he charged us €1 to help
us buy tickets worth €1.50. Welcome to Italy.
Once on the metro, we made our way to the main tourist attraction
in Milan: the Duomo. However, as it happened, the intricate
gothic facade of the Duomo was being repaired, and was
under wraps. Ah well.
By this time, we were also realizing that it was much colder than
we had been expecting, and we didn't have a hotel room to go warm
up in. After visiting the nearby Galeria Vittorio Emanuele II,
we tried to bask in the sun while standing in the piazza outside
the Duomo. But it rapidly became clear that it wasn't
working: our clothes were not keeping us warm enough, and our feet
were freezing. So we decided to cut our tour of Milan short, and
go to Venice rightaway.
We went back to the train station, and got tickets for the 2:30pm train. We figured we'd have lunch at the station, and then wait in the waiting room; at least that would be heated. Yeah, right. So we waited in the non-heated waiting room, and got on the train at 2:30pm. At least the train was warm.
