Officially back from Milan, Italy! And it’s back to the grind for me, but I have pictures of everything I did in Milan (for the most part) and will be updating it over the next couple of posts. Here is the first one:
Oh Milan! You were so nice and leisurely. You provided us with fair weather and stunning views of European life. *sigh*
Anyways, let me talk about what I did there and, of course, the food.
I arrived into Milan’s Malpensa Airport around noon last Friday and took the train into Cadorna station. Malpensa is actually much farther from the Milan city center than the other airport Linate, but Malpensa is also much cooler.
There’s this neat mist room from the main airport to the trains that feels quite refreshing after you’ve been on a trans-Atlantic 8-hour flight.
There are also LED lights on the ground which makes it look like a futuristic walkway.
We took the Malpensa Express, which I recommend if you’re trying to get into the city, to Cadorna station. Using the train is pretty easy to figure out and much cheaper than taking a taxi. The only thing is that you need to have cash ready because none of our US credit/debit cards seemed to be working at the ticket machine (or any ticket machine for that matter).
But, we arrived in Cadorna without too much trouble.
The weather was slightly cloudy. It was cool, brisk spring weather.
We walked around for a little bit, but then saw this cute little cafe
And decided to stop and get gelato, so the first thing I ate in Milan was gelato, delicious creamy gelato.
Ray had been practicing his Italian, so he managed to order gelato without much trouble. As for me, for most of the trip I just pointed at things I wanted, smiled and nodded.
There were so many flavors to choose from!
Look at how creamy it looks
The gelato was lighter than the stuff we have in the States, but yet oh-so-creamy.
Ray enjoying his gelato…
Another thing about the gelato, it melted fast. I had to eat it faster to prevent it from dripping down my cone and onto my hands.
Afterwards, we walked around Cadorna trying to find a proper meal to eat. Eventually we stumbled across this little pizza place called Bio Solaire and got some lunch.
The first thing I noticed when I walked into Bio Solaire was that 1)everybody was pretty much caucasion, 2)there were a bunch of bald guys. Other than that it was a quaint little pizzeria with lots of troll figurines.
Another thing I noticed about Milan was that, for the most part, it’s a lot more homogeneous than the US. For a lot of the non-touristy places we went to we were almost always the only non-white people in the room. At least that meant we were singled out as tourists immediately and the servers were patient and nice to us.
This is what I mean about the trolls
But the other figurines were cute
We ended up getting the pizza of the day, which was topped with parmesean, prosciutto, and basil. It was molto bene.
One thing I really enjoyed about the pizza was how fresh all the ingredients were. The tomato sauce on this pizza was absolutely wonderful. That tomato-y wonderful sweet brightness really came out in the sauce. The surprising thing was that there was only a thing layer of tomato sauce on this pizza, compared to having the sauce sauce caked on in a lot of American pizzas. The proscuitto and parmesean were also quite good, but my favorite thing about the pizza was still the tomato sauce.
After eating we took the scenic route (by which I mean walked) from Cadorna to Pagano (where our hotel was).
It was a nice little walk, even though it was long and my legs and feet were tired. I think at some point during the day (probably during my flight connection at Madrid) I was running in my flats and pulled a muscle in my calf, which remained pulled through most of the trip, but slowly got better towards the end. I definitely learned my lesson about finding proper walking shoes. Just because a shoe is flat doesn’t make it a good walking shoe.
velvetdismality 