I have been meaning to do this post on Milan for days but just have kept on getting interrupted! Better late than never! Last weekend was the last of my outside-of-Spain travels for the trip. Erin and I spent waaayyy too much time on www.easyjet.com the first week we were here looking up all the different possibilities of where we could go on the weekends...cities all around Europe were beckoning! Ha even though all the flights on Easy Jet were cheap in comparison to what you would normally find, we still had to be realistic about our college-student budgets. We were super excited to find a really good deal on a flight to Milan though! Upon talking to some of our Spanish professors and an older Italian man named Lorenzo who is in one of our classes, however, we learned that there are not as many tourist attractions in Milan as other Italian cities, and that it could easily be covered in a day. We heard that there were some really beautiful towns around Milan that would make a good daytrip, so we did some research and decided to do Milan on Friday and take a 30-minute bus to Lake Como for the day Saturday. One of the BEST decisions we've made during our travels! The only downside to the stellar price of our plane tickets was that our flight left at 7 a.m. Friday morning out of Madrid, and then left around that same time Sunday to come back to Madrid. Because we would have had to get up so early to get a bus from Salamanca to Madrid, then, we decided to just get the last bus that left out of Salamanca Thursday night and spend the night in the Madrid airport so we would already be there all ready to go. Yeeahhh. That was one of the lower points of our trip for sure. As the Spanish people would say, it was "fatal." (the colloquial word they use for whenever something didn't go well or was just really bad all around) Hard, cold, metal benches with announcements coming on over the loudspeaker every 10 minutes reminding us to keep a close watch on our luggage. But I digress. Our flight was really smooth and we were able to get some sleep then so it all worked out. We arrived in Milan around 10 and headed first to see the Duomo, which was spectacular!
After the Duomo we walked through an old palace or fortress (sorry I'm a terrible tourist and can't remember what it was called), and then headed to the High Fashion District on Via Montenapoleane. It was a great place for people-watching! Check out this one man's dapper pair of pants. Too funny.
After the fashion district, we were definitely feeling the night at the airport catching up to us so we were ready to head to the hostel. On our way to the metro stop, though, we were smacked in the face by the sight of a gigantic H&M. We decided we had to make a stop considering 30 euro dresses would be pure delight after the unattainability experienced walking down Via Montenapoleane. We finally made it to our hostel after that detour around 5. The "Sweet Hostel" was quite a contrast to the charming Andarhillo of our beloved Porto, but on the bright side I'm glad we got such a well-rounded European hostel experience during our weekend excursions. :) We were in a packed room with about 8 other people....it was like a little taste of the different corners of the world! A couple Brasilians, three other Americans, two backpackers from some Scandinavian country, and an Italian girl. Despite the tight quarters, however, we slept like rocks after our airport slumber party. Saturday we hopped on a bus to Como di Lago really excited about all the stellar reports we'd heard (such as, for example, that it's the location of a scene in one of the Star Wars movies and George Clooney has a house there...reeled us right in!). In all seriousness, the charming city of Como, combined with a PICTURESQUE, to say the least, boat ride across the lake (complete with views of villas and the Alps!) gave us what I think must have been the best possible taste of Northern Italy.
