Milan

The train to Milan was super crowded. I sat knee to knee with a businessman the whole way. I had to do some spidermanning to use the on-board restroom to avoid the two inches of *ahem* water on the floor. We got into the Milan central station and went to our hostel. The 'Sweet Hostel.' Sweet Hostel my *ahem* foot. That place was a piece. So I did what anyone would do at 11pm in Milan. I left to get some pizza. It was a family style Italian restaurant. There were a couple of families finishing dinner. Probably the Corleones, arranging their 'business' affairs. The past couple of restaurants I've been to have had a flat screen TV playing. I'm used to seeing sports playing in a restaurant, but not just any station. Travel tip: do not watch TV at 11pm in Europe. Family restaurant my !@#$#...foot.

It was good to spend a day in Milan and get a small taste of Italy. We saw the Duomo, the second largest Catholic church. I even caught the 5pm Rosary too. The Sforza Castle is pretty impressive as well. We hit up the Milan fashion district and I spent €745 on a jacket. It is awesome. Ok really, no way. In the evening we caught a happy hour special. Free buffet when you order one drink. Easy. 'One Fanta Orange please.' So we had some interesting appetizers, and pastas. And we had as much as we wanted. We went to see if we could sneak in to see Da Vinci's 'Last Supper' but you have to book to see it a few weeks in advance so we weren't surprised when we were turned away. Seeing as how we didn't even decide to go to Milan until a couple days before, we couldn't complain. Let's just say it got put on the list of things to do on a later trip.

My travel buddy G$ is kind of a fly by the seat of the pants guy. I've been teasing him about it quite a bit. It even makes me nervous sometimes, which I think is saying a lot. He didn't want to buy train tickets to Paris until he was sure he wanted to leave Milan. We checked out of our not so 'Sweet' hostel, and put our bags in a locker at the train station, so we didn't have any place planned to stay for the evening. I was surprised he could go so far without making a decision and not be bothered by it. Intrigued by this little spitting match I agreed that we wouldn't book a train, or a hostel until we knew whether we wanted to stay, or go to Paris. I think the movie is 'Men in Black' where there is an alien spaceship that crashes in front of Tommy Lee Jones and Will Smith and they don't move out of the way while it skids to a halt. Anyway, while the ship is plowing up the earth in front of them Will Smith keeps looking nervously back at TLJ to see if he's going to get out of the way. I was Will Smith today. About 9pm I put my cards down and said that if we'd seen enough of Milan, we should probably check on train tickets to Paris.

So we headed back to the station, and found out that since the Paris-bound train was already en route to Milan, there was no way to know if there were open seats (or beds, in this case). So we had to show up at 11:35 pm to see if we could get on standby. In the mean time I looked for an internet cafe in vain to see if we might be able to book a hostel just in case the train was full. So we showed up at 11:35, and we were actually able to get on second class. We even saved like €20 by going second class, and it wasn't even bad at all. Nice. We got the train we wanted and even saved some cash. I was stoked. That is, until the ticket checker came by and asked for our tickets and passports. He stamped our tickets, looked at our passports, gathered them up and said something in French and then, "You. Passport. Morning." What?! Ughhhhhhh. Everything had worked out so well. I guess we had just flown a little to close to the sun, on chicken wings and crappy bar food. So we shared a 6 bed bunk with 3 other French guys that night. Two of them were speaking Arabic as well. None of them spoke English and my combined Arabic+French vocabulary consists of about 6 words, so we didn't have much interaction with them. Anyway, it was ok because we slept on the train and got our passports in the morning and all was well in Paris.