Milan - Book Well In Advance

This is long story which I will share with you on some sort of abbreviated level. We booked our tickets to Milan the Monday before we left. It was a good idea then.

Saturday Morning 4.45 a.m: I get up to get ready for my 6 hour bus drive to Milan. I put on nice clothes (it is Milan afterall), feed the fish and I get a message from Jude saying she may not make the bus. Jude had everyone's tickets. I give her a hearty talking to and then she thinks she will make it. Christie is late, Brita and Ola are late but we finally meet up outside the Opera House. There's a bus there, "Avanti- Freiburg to Shanghai". We guessed it wasn't for us and after how they drove us to Milan, we were very glad that we weren't going to Shanghai. The drive down was amazing, we saw the Alps in all their glorious splendour (I tried singing the Toblerone ad as I saw them) and went through that big ol' special tunnel that people seemed pretty impressed by but it was just like every other tunnel I've seen. I can't sleep much on buses so I stayed awake until we were ten minutes away from our drop off point in Milan, Nice move. Milan is beautiful, expensive and pretty inaccessible!

The Last Supper: We didn't book tickets to The Last Supper as we presumed that at this time of year there wouldn't be many crowds. Turns out you have to book one month in advance no matter what time of year and even if there is or there is not any crowds. We tried everything. I was an art history teacher with her students, they had "lost" our booking, we tried walking in with a tour but they were pretty used to these sort of things so we were caught out. So we did the next best thing; we took photos of posters, postcards, glass cuttings, "ivory" statues and rosary beads of The Last Supper and photos of us looking sad outside the building. Then we decided to go back into the ticket office and we took our photo beside big posters of the painting and the not irratewoman who wouldn't let us in, it was her fault really.


Duomo Di Milano: I should probably mention that we at foccacia before we saw this and drank good Italian coffee. The Duomo is just magnificent! The mind that conjured up such a work of art was definitely insane or some sort of divine interception cut through his wave length. The inside has mummified people...what's not to love...I avoided those ones. We paid the costly €8 and went up in the lift to walk in the flying buttresses (which Jude didn't believe was the real word for them) and then we got to walk on the roof of the Duomo. I have walked on the roof of a cathedral! There was a huge screen in the plazza below showing the 6 Nations Italy vs. England match. So Jude and I gave our encouragement to the Italian team from the cathedral roof!

The Da Vinci Technical Museum: A rainstorm started and it rained, and it rained, it stopped and rained more. We decided the only way to get away from it was to eat ice-cream which we did. I heart Italian ice-cream. We looked through the tour book and saw the Da Vinci museum as we hadn't seen The Last Supper(we decided it was probably overrated) we thought it'd be a good idea to see something of Da Vinci. We walked for an hour in the rain, we wer drowned rats. When Jude and Christie started holding the falling apart map upside down I called off the adventure and we went for cocktails in a fancy bar. The bathroom of the bar however was just a hole in the ground: Jude and Christie had never seen anything like this before and couldn't go near the bathroom thereafter.

The Bus Home: We went for a meal near to where the bus was meant to be, we had ice cream for dessert. We waited for the bus which was 10 minutes late, 20 minutes late, 45 minutes late. So we went for more ice cream as time was running out. Finally the bus arrived but the driver wouldn't let us on. (while we waited for an explanation we ran to a cafe to pass the time out of the rain and watched as our bus pulled away and drove off, Ola and I legged it and caught up with it as she was going pretty slow and turned out to be parking somewhere else)When we got on the bus we waited more. It took half an hour to find out that we were waiting for the police to come. Why? While the driver was sleeping in the seats of the bus, two guys broke in, hot wired the bus and started to drive it away, she woke up at the sound of the engine and realised what was going on. The guys didn't know she was there so when she started yelling and throwing everything at hand they scarperred. The police never arrived and we left. The bus crowd were not the happiest while waiting for the police so Christie and I cracked open a bottle of wine and discussed the matters of the worlsd. I'm pretty sure we sorted out every world problem, the wonders of Italian wine!

I met the driver who was crying in the bathroom at one of our stops along the way. It was a miracle we ever got the bus back as she would normally sleep in the cabin in the under part of the bus, wouldn't have heard the engine and would have woken up wherever those guys were driving. So she was a bit shaky on the road and went pretty slow. So slow she missed the time frame in which you can go down that fancy tunnel in the Alps, meaning we had to take back roads. While the entire bus slept the driver, Ola and me were wide awake. Ola was devising ways of how we'd survive in the snow when/if the bus crashed on the hairpin bends or broke down. Everyone had dressed for the fashionable Milan not the snow. I was preoccupiedwith the wheel below my window, the driver put on the snow wheel things and every 50 metres stopped the bus and had to readjust them. After awhile she started to ignore the wheel which was making unhealthy noises.

The back roads got worse and worse and more and more less like roads but goat trails. Ola fell asleep once we reached Zurich, yeah you must be wondering how we got there...so do we. Jude forgot her insulin so wasn't in the best of form but was fine, Christie my chair buddy kicked, talked, and hugged me in her sleep. The hugging and cuddling I could handle the kicking and speaking in tongues was quite off putting. Finally I passed out due to exhaustion at 7 a.m., we left Milan at 12. I woke up 20 minutes later as Christie had pushed me off my seat. No harm done, she was still fast asleep. I fell asleep again around 8 and slept until Jude shook my foot, I opened my eyes to see a frightened Jude. When I asked why it was because I snarled and growled at her in my sleep when she shook my foot. Served her right.

I got back to my home at 9.45 a.m., 7.5 hours later than I thought and I had left there almost 30 hours ago. My teeth felt like small hamsters, my mascara had become a permanent resident to my face.

What have I learned? Always book in advance, fly first class and leave Milan before you are left there.

Milan is a once in a lifetime thing. You'll only ever want to do it once.