Ah Milan, the International City of Fashion, the city aspiring models dream to go to, the city young designers wish to have their work presented in, the city of many’s dreams. Yet to us, Milan was just the city of getting lost! It took us five hours to find our hotel after we arrived by train in Milan! We had just got in from Zurich, where we had spent three days surviving on way over-priced grocery food. We found few people could help us with directions in English! We asked people, but just ended up more and more lost!
Google also wasn’t our friend on this trip! Google got us more lost than the our non-English speaking navigators did! It didn’t help that Milan has both an above ground train system and a subway system, and they don’t have stations in the same place! We got very confused trying to find our way to our hotel. Oh, and now I remember that originally we had planned to stay in this cheap hotel way out in the middle of nowhere! But after we had been trying to find it for hours we decided it would be nicer to stay in a bit nicer hotel somewhere closer to the main city.
So we booked one using what data I had left on my phone and called them to find out how to get to them. They did tell us how to get to them using the train system (and they told us in English thankfully), but the nearest train station to them was still about two miles from the hotel! So we got out and then dragging all our luggage and getting rained on (we got rained on at least once in every country we went to during this trip by the way, I think at least once in every city actually!) we made our way to the hotel. It took us a while, Ziqin wasn’t feeling real well either. Now what do you expect we found out when we got to the hotel? Well it turns out the hotel has a shuttle that takes people to and from the train station! We had been on the phone with them and they hadn’t mentioned that at all! They had implied that we’d have to figure out how to get their from the train station!
Oh well, after all the food we had been eating during the trip that bit of exercise was probably much overdue 
Anyhow, that evening we took advantage of the free shuttle to the train station and headed back into town for some dinner! We tried to purchase tickets for the train, but no one was selling them! So I am a bit ashamed to say we just kind of hopped on the train without paying…I guess it balanced out later when we accidentally wasted two subway tickets in Paris when we ended up not riding the subway! After our long afternoon of trying to find the hotel we figured some fine dining was in order I don’t remember the name of the restaurant, maybe Ziqin will…guess that doesn’t make this a very good travel blog seeing as I’m not giving you those sorts of specifics, I’ll try to do better in the future! Anyhow, I do know that I got lasagna and Ziqin got steak, and we quite enjoyed our dinner! And yes, I did not remember what we ate but Ziqin came to the rescue and let me know
After dinner we wandered around town a bit and then made our way back to the hotel. We slept well that night! The next day we took the train back into town and checked out the Duomo di Milano (Milan Cathedral) and the oh-so-famous Milan Shopping Center! It was also a Fashion Week as it turned out, so there were lots of people there dressed in all sorts of strange clothing if you ask me, but then I’m not really all that “in” when it comes to fashion! Ziqin also fed a bunch of pigeons in front of the shopping center, they seemed to appreciate it!
Well we made our way over to the train station next where we found a shuttle bus heading to the airport we wanted to go to. We bought our tickets and then grabbed some dinner/lunch whatever time of day it was.
Oh, before I forget I should really mention what happened the first time we were in Milan! We were there just a few days earlier when we were heading to Zurich from Cinque Terre. We had a stop in Milan for just a couple hours, just enough time to walk into town and grab some food. We went to this restaurant where they sold calzones and kebob. Ziqin had some kebob and I had a calzone! We were in a bit of a hurry so we wanted to take the food to go, but the owner said my calzone had to be eaten fresh or it wouldn’t be good! So he wouldn’t let me take it!
We really were in a hurry so I started to take a bag myself to bag it up and head out, and he finally relented and boxed it up for me. But he seemed very upset! He apparently takes a certain pride in his dishes and doesn’t want people eating them in a way he thinks they shouldn’t be…Anyhow we both thought it was kind of funny The calzone still tasted excellent on the train to Zurich!
That is about all there is to share about our time in Milan, we were probably only there a total of 24 hours between the two times we were there! It isn’t really too exciting of a place to go to us, we’d much rather spend more time in Cinque Terre if we find ourselves back in Italy someday, which we probably will!