next up was milan, we only spent a day there and i think a day did the city justice by me to be honest. coming from paris we took an overnight train in which our cabin mates were two couples as wholly different from one another as from us. the whole thing was a stellar social experiment and i really enjoyed interacting with everyone a couple hours before we all got organized and in our respective beds. a brief description of the six of us: two an older hippie couple from britain, well read and well informed, very interesting, very well traveled and totally self-sufficient, two a younger couple from milan, very urban, the man spoke good english and was quite friendly, the woman spoke french (both italian) and was a bit more self-contained and in-between this communism and consumerism was us or so i believe, two late twenty-something college educated north americans who i am less able to come up with adjectives for so freely because as with most things the more you know the more that slips away from brevity. what i mean by this is being more connected to something, obfuscates.

once in milan at some sun rising hour i felt at home simply for the fact that i could now speak italian. that i now knew more about the culture, the gestures... in milan we utilized to excellent end the subway system which was simple to navigate. we went to the duomo, gorgeous and a nearby castle, video-ed and its adjacent park. our hotel was family run and "the man of the house" was quite witty, our room awesome: green walls, old wooden window frames, high ceiling,... the day was very unrushed and milan seemed to me fairly bland, an urban mid-sized city in which one can see the daily happenings of a mostly residential population and which would mean more to one if one lived there, but didn't make me yearn to live there. i am glad we stopped by, milan has a kind of odd status around here since a lot of people head up north to work since work is scarce closer to home and it was worthwhile to have an actual place to connect and deflate the hearsay.