Oct 26, 2012

Milan - City Tour, Party and Hostel

Milan has welcomed us very nicely - fresh morning air, cloudless sky and peaceful atmosphere of saturday morning. We stopped in very first caffe we found for a brekfast. Prizes in Milan are completely different when compared to those in Lugano, everythig seems so cheep. We had cappuccino, milk with honey and croissant with marmelade.
After this refreshing brekfast we begun our city tour. We had no specific itinerrary, just a short list of places we wanted to visit. Without a map we were just randomly walking through the Milan's luxurious streets. First landmark we came across was Castello Sfortezsco and adjacent park. First, we hang out for a while in this park and enjoyed the atmosphere of the local families spending their weekend by various games, picnics or just walks.


Our walk continued to the very heart of Milan - Duomo di Milano. I don't think that I could describe the duomo in all its beauty and complexity, all the statues, narrow towers, ... I'd better reference you to someone more relevenat in this area - Mark Twain.


What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful! A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems ...a delusion of frostwork that might vanish with a breath!...Away above, on the lofty roof, rank on rank of carved and fretted spires spring high in the air, and through their rich tracery one sees the sky beyond. -- Mark Twain
After enjoying beauty of the past times represented by the Duomo, we came back to the present world to see what is considered modern and stylish nowadays. Big part of contemporary fashion world is concentrated in the wery small area - Corso Vittorio Emanuelle II and Via Montenapoleone. Louis Vitton, Dolce & Gabana, Prada, Gucci, Versace, Armani - that are just some of all the luxurious boutiques over there. In every of those boutiques there are specially trained shop assistants dressed up in a uniform. There is also a guy who opens a door for you and welcomes you in the shop.

Just after a few blocks further the atmosphere completely changed again. We left the modern luxury and entered to the world of artists. Narrow streets garnished with paintings full of color, abstract shapes and various thoughts put on the canvas. There also were some slovak folk paintings from Humenne.

To come back to reality from those little worlds, that very easily confuses you are living a completely different place and time, we went to one of numerous Milan's parks. But it evolved another way as we expected. Instead of coming back to reality we slipped to conversation about different dimensions of the world. We imagined that the people going around us are cows and birds in lower dimension, that we can influence their flow of reality without their notice. Similarly, we are just the same intercepted by creatures from higher dimension and so on. Then appeared strange humble bee, who we considered to be the godzilla eating and destructing the civilization living on my jeans. (Why would normal people keep such a veird conversation? Well, we were not completely normal in that time; who knows why...)

Till now everything was perfect but things begun to fell apart as soon as we decided to go to our hostel and check-in. We somehow managed to screw up our reservation - we reserved it for the wrong date. But the guy in hostel was very willing (in his specific way) and helped us to find other free room, which would be otherwise inpossible to find by ourselves. He was perfect example of an Italian, his desk was in an (un)organized chaos. There were sticky notes and drafts of papers with some notes all over his workplace. When the internet did not work he smashed his hand to the table and mumbled something in italian. Finally, he found some hostel for us, but it was on the opposite side of the city. He also wrote us exact instruction how to get there, he repeated it to us at least five times, each time more and more nervously as we still had some additional questions. But he explained it very cleary  because we had no problem finding the place.

In our backup hostel we took a short rest after the exhausting day. We needed to gain new energy to explore the Milan's nightlife. Milan is not only the capital of fashion, business, but it is also the city in which nightlife means much more than a simple drawn-out dinner. There are hundreds and hundreds of bars, lounge bars, wine bars, pubs, cafés, bistrots, pubs, wine cellars, live music bars and lots of others besides. The Milanese night scene is so wide-ranging and changes continuously, just like everything in this eclectic city. There are clubs that are furnished in hi-tech style, or that are inspired by the Savannah, with leopard-skin chairs, palm trees and pretend elephants’ heads. We started our night tour by having drinks at metro station and then next to the Duomo. We have been searching for some club so long that we actually did not visit any of them. The nightlife in Milan is so electric that we actually realized we should go to some club at 4am, which was very bad time because the clubs were already closing. So instead we had a 1.5 hour walk back to our hostel through Milans night streets.

In the morning, the hostel cleaning lady has waken us up telling us we must leave our room till 11:00. Half asleep, we told her to give us five more minutes. It was very difficult, but we managed to leave our room just on time. First place we went after leaving the hostel was nearby cafe where we had our brekfast - capuccino with a sendwich.

Milan is famous mainly as a city of fashion so we wanted to buy some cool jeans or shirt. We headed straight to the shopping area but we were not much successful. We found just one shop with affortable prizes but we didn't find anything worth of buying.

After the last night we really didn't feel like walking, so as we came in front of duomo we sat down on the walking path. We discussed our night trip and also planned what to do during the rest of the day. We didn't thought of anything special so we just roamed through the Milans historic streets. Somehow we managed to come to the Brera, known as the Milan's "Little Paris". Streets were really beautiful, somehow different from the rest of the city. The restaurants mixed with the street fairs full of old things - old photos, old toys, old ceramics,... It was really special. At the end of the street there was one little restaurant with quite friendly prizes, so we did not hesitate and stopped there for a lunch.

TODO:
-park pri hrade
-komplikacie s listkami na stanici(vlak na ktory sme sli nechodi v nedelu; neplatny spiatocny listok a kupa noveho)

No comments:

Post a Comment