Needing some down time I headed to Milan after Verona for a bit of R&R. A checked into a rather nice hotel near the centre of Milan (I though it was quite a distance out given it’s distance from the train station, but it turns out the train station is just miles away).
I decided to jump on the big red Sight Seeing buses which they also have in Leeds but I figured because Milan is far more interesting than Leeds the Milan one wouldn’t be shit (I haven’t been in the Leeds one, but it’s a pretty safe guess it is).
It as quite a good deal as they have two routes but you just buy one 24 hour ticket and that gives you access to them both. You also get a pair of headphones which are presumably rubbish (I didn’t try mine) though luckily I had my mini headphones, though unfortunately not my awesome noise canceling ones.
After doing both the tours round the city, I decided to go for a wander down the castle and have a look round. That really reminded me of the internet – full of Africans trying to scam you. Luckily shouting “sorry, ich spreche kein Englisch” seemed to get rid of them.
The cathedral, or Duomo di Milano if you will, was amazing – it was absolutely covered in statues, they were all over the walls and on every spire. Apparently it was quite luckily to see if without any building works on.
Had an interesting conversation on the way out also – trying to speak Italian to a taxi driver when I had never spoken a word of it before was a crazy experience. “Parco Trenno per favore.” “Parco Trenno? You mean Parco Trenno?” I’m 99% certain I pronounced it exactly the same as he did but he insisted it was Parco Trenno, not Parco Trenno. He then didn’t believe me that I wanted to go to Parco Trenno so I then had to try and explain that is where I was meeting my friends.
Still, a taxi was a much faster way of getting out of Milan than driving in – using the back streets, using the bus lane as a regular lane and not really caring if you almost wipe out a few people on mopeds make for much speedier driving.
One thing that I really did pick up on in Europe is how much better their public transport is than ours – most have a bus network, a tram system and an underground system as well as proper cycle lanes that aren’t simply a little painted line running in the main road.
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This entry was posted on Thursday, September 23rd, 2010 at 9:12 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.