Buonjiorno Italia

This morning I woke up in Turkey, where our layover was, which was a weird feeling because three years ago my family actually travelled to Turkey for two weeks. After getting through customs and all, I was on the lookout for some turkish delight, you can't really find the good stuff in the US. I saw a store in the airport that had a ton of boxes of it, but all I wanted was a taste to remind me of my time in Turkey. There were many samples out so I took one and it was so good. I miss having that everyday, even though it really isn't good for you.

Our layover wasn't long and after walking what felt like a mile to our gate we were pretty much boarding. Our 2.5 hour flight felt like nothing compared to the almost 11 hour flight to get to Turkey. When we finally got to Italy we had no idea where we were going or what we were doing because we hadn't been able to find the guide book we use in English. Per my dad's instruction we found the trains to take to our hotel. However, we ended up getting on one to a station a little ways from our hotel, whoops. Once we arrived at the wrong station we were able to just get on the subway to the station by our hotel. However, we couldn't figure out the correct exit to go out of and we ended up a few blocks away from our hotel. We probably looked like quite the tourists, rolling our luggage along a busy street and looking around to see if we could find our hotel. My dad was already at the hotel because his flight got in before ours.

After showering off the plane germs we got right to it by heading to the famous Duomo. This is a cathedral that was built in the 1400s and it is beautiful! We got to go up on the terraces, basically the roof, and see the upper detail of the cathedral. It has been undergoing a lot of restoration and cleaning so part of it was behind scaffolding, but it was amazing none the less. We also saw the nearby Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, which is a cross shaped building home to many restaurants and designer stores like Prada. We ate lunch in a restaurant in this building and I had some gnocci and braised lettuce. After we found a book store that was enormous and had tons and tons of books in English. We were lucky enough to find our tour books! Not feeling so lost and helpless anymore, we started looking for stuff to do in the area by us while my dad took a phone call for about two hours. While he was talking my mom and I tried to get into two museums, Palazzo Reale and Museo del Novecento, but they seemed to be closed even though their hours said they were open. It almost seemed like they got to pick what time they closed.

When he was done, the three of us walked all the way through the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, ending up in a plaza with a Leonardo da Vinci statue, the opera house, and an enormous, three palace Gallerie d'Italia art museum, which was of course closed. We walked down the road a bit until we arrived at the Palazzo della Ragione, which is one of the few surviving medieval buildings in the city. I was impressed to find that the buildings were filled with restaurants and people. I think it is cool that the modern city is able to fit itself inside of ancient Milan. We continued down the street an found the Biblioteca e Pinacoteca Ambrosiana, Europe's first public library (1609). We couldn't go inside because it was closed, but it was amazing to see. My dad was surprised by the building's simplicity considering it houses some of history's greatest authors.

Eventually we got hungry and headed to a restaurant suggested by our guide book, Trattoria Milanese. This restaurant was hard to find and you wouldn't be able to at all if you didn't know it was there. This was probably the reason that it was full of locals. In fact, there wasn't even an English menu. Our waiter helped us out though. My dad accidentally ordered us three appetizers, which were good but a bit much. We ended up having a bread basket, figs and cantaloupe, tomato and mozzarella, and asparagus. For our actual meal I had pumpkin ravioli, my mom had mushroom spaghetti, and my dad had veal (sad moo). Dinner ended with some biscotti and espresso for my pops. Not disappointed by our first night of Italian food, though the gluten did make my stomach hurt a bit, we returned to our beds.