Milan at a run
Our arrival in Milan was a bit rough for most of our party. A few hours of poor sleep on an airplane meant that we started out already exhausted. (”We” is a bit of an exaggeration; I slept less than any of us, but I was mysteriously wide awake, amped up on the excitement of traveling abroad again.) Our plane had been delayed for four hours, so we touched down on Italian soil ten minutes before our appointment to see the original painting of The Last Supper made by Leonardo Da Vinci.
NOTE: When planning an international trip, plan a LOT of margin, and then count on your best-laid plans going awry anyways. When they work out, you will be pleased and delighted, and when they inevitably don’t, you will say, “Oh well, that’s a real shame.”
With no real backup plan but a short list of other things we wanted to see in our half-day in the city, we headed into Milan to see what we could see. I do mean headed into. Italian cities are old enough that the airports are often 30-40 minutes outside of the city. We took the Malpensa Express from the airport to Milano Cadorna station, which was the closest to the Santa Maria delle Grazie, the church where The Last Supper is kept. We headed there in the off-chance that they had any last-minute cancellations, along with quite a few other tourists. Spoiler alert: there were none, as the reservations fill up weeks in advance and a lot of people are trying to get into those rare last-minute spots.
It was nearly 3:00 pm in Milan, and we had only had a light breakfast on the airplane, so we decided to continue on to the restaurant we had scoped out for dinner. I recommended we walk there, since public transportation would take 18 minutes but walking was only 20 minutes. One of our party declared it the longest 20 minutes of their life, however. Though exhausting, walking was worth it in my opinion. We saw more of Milan than we would have otherwise. We walked past quaint gelato carts, lingerie stores, actual tailors with stacks of raw cloth, kids playing soccer in a piazza after school, a park with ancient ruins, a thousand cafes with tables on the sidewalk, a giant statue of a middle finger (yes, really), crowds of tourists, and quiet business districts. It was a crash course in Italian cities.
We had read a lot of warnings that Italians have dinner so late it might not be a possibility to get a meal in the middle of the afternoon, but luckily, Casa Lodi was still serving lunch. There were only a few other groups dining at that point, so it was easy to get a table. The waitress spoke enough English and I spoke enough Italian (thanks to a couple of months of Duolingo and an Italian phrasebook for travelers) that ordering wasn’t too difficult. The food was outstanding. I had one of the local dishes that were recommended: risotto alle zafferano (saffron risotto). It was easily one of the best things I have eaten in my entire life, but I actually liked the dish my husband had even better. It was handmade tortelli pasta stuffed with cheese and apples in a light basil cream sauce, and it was perfection.
The most difficult part of navigating the meal was the payment. Italians are courteous to the extreme when it comes to restaurant etiquette. When you sit down, a coperta (cover charge) is added to your bill to claim your right to that table, and as far as they are concerned, that table is then yours for as long as you want to stay. They will never offer you a bill and will never rush you off in order to seat another group. Tips are appreciated but not an essential part of their salary, so table turn-over isn’t a priority. Even knowing that, the waitress was hard to flag down and was in no hurry to get us our bill or take it once we had our payment ready. It was an extra 30-45 minutes after we decided we were done before we actually managed to leave. (When I said to plan for a lot of extra time, I wasn’t kidding.)
After lunch? Dinner? Breakfast? our meal, the adrenaline of being in a foreign city had worn off and exhaustion had kicked in full-force. (There was something wrong with me. I never function on so little sleep, but I was still ready to run through the streets of Milan with my arms out wide like a kid too full of joy to contain it. Also, this is a little thing called foreshadowing. Take note of the word “run.”) We decided to take an Uber to our next destination from the Duomo, which was just around the corner from Casa Lodi.
The cathedral is massive and somehow delicate at the same time. It was overshadowed a bit by the beginnings of Milan’s Fashion Week, a world-famous event that we had somehow missed was happening this week when we made our plans. The piazza was covered in stages, sound equipment, and lighting, and several of the building facades were covered in faux fronts to allow large Times Square-style screens to advertise designer labels.
When he finally arrived, our Uber driver took us to (COVER YOUR CHILDREN’S EYES HERE, FOLKS) Mr. Dick’s Sexy Pasticceria, a pastry shop specializing in penis- and vagina-shaped waffles dipped in chocolate and a variety of toppings. It was a strange and delightful experience, designed to make you giggle the entire time. The pastries were actually not very impressive, but the experience was worth it. Maaaayyybbbbeee not, if you’re short on time, but hindsight is everything. And to be fair, we didn’t know at the time that we were short on time. It was only 5:30 pm and our train to Lake Como wasn’t until 8:00 pm.
We walked a couple of blocks towards where a taxi stand was supposed to be, but partway there, both of the phones we were using died. They hadn’t charged very well on the plane, partly due to user error, and the networks were so busy that all our searches had been slow throughout the day. A quick plug here to add an international data plan to your cell phone bill if you can. Ours from AT&T was $10/day (only for the days + devices that you used it on) to access our usual cell phone plan, including the unlimited data we were used to.
Dead phones and free Wi-Fi that didn’t actually work at a McDonald’s left us scrambling for a solution. Hailing a taxi is not something you do in Italy; you use an app called FreeNow or call a company to arrange a pickup. All pick-ups are done at pre-ordained taxi loading zones, where there are lines to wait in if you have not used the app. However, every taxi that passed us while we waited at the stand was very full, and Ubers were less common, less quick, and impossible to book without an internet connection. We had several options to solve the problem, but none of them were very appealing as exhausted as we were (aka walking 45 minutes back to the train station or finding a metro station and navigating it without the help of Google Maps).
A lady working the counter of a quiet shop specializing in handmade leather shoes loaned me the use of her cellphone charger, gave me the number to a local taxi company that was less likely to be overbooked, and even helped me navigate the confusing Italian audio menus. The taxi met us at the little park across the street, and took us back to Milano Cadorna station, where a nearby cafe had kept our luggage in a locked room for us. (We used an app called Bounce, which is like Uber but for stashing your luggage in convenient places. The internet is a wonder.)
We were tight on time, which is where the running begins. Our train did not leave from Cadorna but from Milano Centrale station, the main train station and metro hub for the city. We caught the Metro right as it was departing, and arrived at the massive station where our train to Lake Como would depart. (The station was beautiful, although we couldn’t stop to appreciate it at the moment).
We asked for directions to the terminal at several points, because my phone had lost all the brief charge it had gotten back at the shoe store, but we managed to buy the correct metro tickets and train tickets thanks to our earlier experiences with the system. A Trennord employee directed us to the last track on the left, and advised us to run since it was departing NOW. So we ran. Wasn’t that foreshadowing from earlier nice? We made it onto our train with moments to spare from its actual departure time, only to find out that the train was delayed by 8 minutes. We might have laughed but by that point, we were too tired to feel much except anxiety. Even me.
So much could have gone very badly, but whatever saint that watches over travelers had their hand on us that whole evening. It helped quite a bit that half of our party had previous experience with European travel; this is in no shape or form a “how-to” guide for Milan. However, everything worked out in the end, and we arrived in the caring hands of our AirBNB hostess in Perledo without incident. It was too dark to see anything but glittering lights reflected on the lake, but we were at Lake Como at last, where we could finally take things a little slower. We hoped.
NOTE TO SELF (AND OTHERS): When stashing your luggage for the day on your first day in a foreign city, do NOT leave your cell phone charger and battery backup IN said luggage. Even if you have well over 50% charge on your phone, which might last for a half-day excursion back home, YOU WILL NEED IT. If you don’t have your own charger on you, store-bought will do. Otherwise you are at the mercy of the Milanese leather workers, which in my experience are extremely friendly and helpful people but not the typical or ideal sources for battery power.
Favorite thing of the day: a tie between risotto at Casa Lodi and kind Italian artisans with spare phone chargers
Least favorite thing of the day: Milan fashion week, which made it unexpectedly difficult to find a taxi when we were tired
Miles walked: 3.5 miles
Steps: 8,401
Flights climbed: 3
