Wet Socks and Fine Dining in Milan

When Understanding Frenchman and I made our first trip together to Italy, the aim of our two days in Milan was for me to introduce him to the city I lived in for a year and give him an insider's peek into la dolce vita alla milanese. On our first day, however, this plan was neatly scuppered by the fact that we stayed at completely the opposite end of town from all my old haunts, coupled with the wettest rain ever to fall on the city. As a result, we spent our first evening hiding under porticoes, darting into shops and peering out at the soggy blackness from underneath a shared umbrella (how romantic ... ).

And so it was that when we pitched up at our friends' house for dinner after waiting for half an hour for a bus, that the first thing we did was ask them to lend us some dry socks.

The evening rapidly improved however, as the prosecco was cracked open and we enjoyed a delicious hot dinner of roast lamb, risotto and caramelised onions, and an even more heated discussion about the correct points to eat bread during a meal and whether it's irritating to correct your other half in the middle of a sentence when they're speaking your mother tongue and not theirs. (My friend, a former colleague, is Irish and her boyfriend Italian, so needless to say, he and Understanding Frenchman put up a united front of Mediterranean solidarity, while she and I defended our right to eat carbohydrates and speak uncorrected.)

The quality of the food, though, was not in question. After the lamb, we had burrata, which is a bit like a giant mozzarella, but much runnier, served with olive oil and cherry tomatoes, and another new experience for me fichi d'India, or Indian figs. These are crazy looking fruits that come in pink and yellow and have hints of spines on the outside. You peel them and eat the inside, which is closest to the seedy part of a kiwi fruit that to anything else I can think of, but as with a pomegranate, you have to be careful not to crunch the seeds, which taste bitter.

I thought I was fairly familiar with most Italian foods, so it was nice to discover there are still delicious surprises out there!

Ladies Who Lunch a Milano

I left the lake on Wednesday morning and caught the train from Varenna back to Milan. When I lived in Milan, time spent outside of the city was golden, but having left, I was anxious for a dip back into my old life.

My first stop was the Mondadori bookshop on Piazza Duomo, where I picked up a couple of books by Niccolo' Amaniti and Lidia Ravera and mused at the fact that, although Mondadori is currently embroiled in a major corruption scandal and has just been ordered to pay a 560 million euro fine for its misdeeds, everything felt clean, normal and calm, almost to the point of being un-Italian. I left with my books in an eco-friendly paper bag with a message encouraging me to use energy-saving lightbulbs and save the planet.

After that I walked back across the piazza, giving bracelet-sellers and pooping pigeons alike my best Parisian glare, and met my friend, who took me to the Californian bakery on Via Larga for lunch. Lesson learned: if you would like to sit in a shaded outdoor garden eating a bagel topped with fresh, healthy ingredients, this is the place for you. If you would like to eat large quantities of delicious baked goods, rest assured, this place is genuinely American in its attitude to dessert. If you would prefer your delicious cake to be accompanied by equally delicious coffee, think again. While my friend may have been a little mean in her condemnation of our espressos as "sock juice", they were definitely more USA than Italian in style too and, in my book, this is not such a good thing.

My last hour in Milan was spent in a rapid raid of the three fabulous floors of my favourite Italian clothes shop, Nadine, whose flagship store is located at San Babila. While the quality is sometimes not quite high enough to justify the price, the clothes have a definite Italian style that is hard to find in France (There is colour! There are chic little details that you don't have to be a Parisian fashionista to notice!) and I picked up a sweet little bag, reduced from 45 euros to 20 to take home with me. Happiness is ...

Linguistic Slip-Up Nearly Causes Culinary Confusion

Back in Milan for a few days over the weekend in an attempt to get my Italy fix for the summer, a friend and I went out for drinks at Il Coccio, a bar with a big outside terrace and a highly dangerous staircase if you need to go to the toilet after a couple of drinks on the corner of the Naviglio Grande and the Naviglio Pavese. The waiter came to take our orders and I told him the name of the cocktail I wanted.

"But we don't serve pizza here," he said.

Because, ladies and gentlemen, the cocktail is a margarita, the pizza is a margherita, and in Italian you can actually hear the difference.

Italia mon amour

Just over a week ago, I got on a train in the Gare de Lyon. We sped across France, the Alps and the plains of northern Italy, and seven hours and fifteen minutes later, I stepped off the train at Milano Centrale and back into my old life.

And for one week, I lived that life again (in fact, it was better than my old life, because I was on holiday and didn't have to go to work) and I remembered how much I loved it. Then, seven days later, I got back on the train, and seven hours later, was back in my French life again.

The trip was amazing. Sad, in some ways, because it reminded me of things that I had left behind, but satisfying too, because it showed me that many of these things are there, no further than a train journey away.

I spent the first day walking around Milan, reminding myself of all the familiar places and discovering the coffee shop in the Mondadori bookshop on the Piazza del Duomo, which has delicious hot chocolate, comfortable chairs and a great view of the square and the cathedral. Then I walked down to the Navigli, caught the metro back to the castle and the Parco Sempione, wandered around some of my favourite shops, and went back for more coffee in Mondadori. Here are some of the more picturesque things that I saw:

Parli Italiolo?

After my mum left last week, my friend R. and her boyfriend P. came to stay. R. is Scottish, but she lives in Seville, and P. is Spanish. As I know about twenty words in Spanish, most of which make up bizarre curses which R. taught me when we were flatmates at uni, and P. only spoke a little bit of English, we spent the next three days testing the theory that Spanish and Italian are mutually comprehensible languages (that is, that Italian speakers can understand Spanish and vice versa). I came to the conclusion that this theory is exaggerated. While the two languages, like Italian and French, are very similar grammatically and many of their words have the same origins, differences in pronunciation and in many very common words mean that, while it may be very easy for an Italian speaker to learn Spanish, just as it was easy for me to learn Italian after learning French, everyday communication is not that easy. Interestingly, I found it easier to understand P's views on bull fighting and opening the market for illegal drugs than to figure out what he wanted for breakfast, but that may have had something to do with the amount of wine we both drank before the first two conversations started. At one point, though, P. and R. got into a very animated conversation about cock-fighting (la pelea de gallos) and I found myself wondering what people from Wales (el pais de Gales) had done to upset them.

On Wednesday night, I introduced them to aperitivo and Milanese cocktails and we had an evening of complicated but great fun conversation with two of my friends from work. On Thursday, they went sightseeing in town and on Friday we went to the beach. In Milan.

Technically, the “beach” in Milan, which can be found in Piazza Carlo Magno next to the Fiera Milano City, is My Island, an outdoor swimming pool surrounded by sand, artificial grass and sun loungers, which has been created in the middle of what would otherwise look like a building site. The pool is not enormous and it was full of children when we were there, and the bar staff were a bit grumpy, but in a city that has so little outdoor space where you can laze around in the sunshine, it was a nice place to spend an afternoon. As well as the pool, there are tennis and volleyball courts and the whole venue turns into a bar/club at night. Even the DVD of waves crashing on a beach that was projected onto a screen above the pool was quite nice...



until the credits started to roll!

In Which I Fall for the Oldest Trick in the Book

I had a long day yesterday. I got up at four o'clock in the morning, was travelling for most of the day and arrived back at the Stazione Centrale at half past eleven at night. Mr. A was coming to pick me up in the car, but my bus got in early, so I had to wait for him outside the station in the area where the airport buses arrive.

That part of town has a bad reputation, so when a man approached me saying, "Taxi, taxi, taxi?" I made a point of saying,"No, grazie" very firmly and walking off. Unfortunately, I did have to wait for Mr A, so I stopped a little further down where one of the airport buses was getting ready to leave and there were plenty of people around and put my two bags down at my feet to wait. 

I was tired, hungry and somewhat pissed off by this stage. Then a second guy approached me and asked me where to go to catch a train. I could tell from the way he asked the question that he wasn't really looking for a train and assumed I was in for the usual, "You're not from here, where are you from, do you have a boyfriend" conversation, so I decided the best thing to do was just to give a quick answer and then ignore him and, if necessary walk away, but he pretended not to understand my answer and I had to repeat it. It was then that I heard someone on the bus banging on the window and shouting, "Put it down! Put it down!" I turned around to see one of my bags lying on the pavement a few metres away and another guy running away around the back of the bus.

In years and years of travelling in big cities in Europe, this was actually the first time that anything like this had ever happened to me. I get the "friendly" harrassment conversations all the time, but I'm usually really good at looking after my stuff. In fact, all my important things were in my handbag, which I was holding on to (although I wouldn't necessarily have noticed if the guy had tried to pick my pockets), and I think the thieves would have been pretty disappointed to open up the other bag and discover nothing but an English newspaper and the remains of my packed lunch, but what scared me was that I didn't even suspect what the two guys were doing. I was so busy expecting one kind of problem that I forgot to be open to other possibilities.

So I guess what I learned from this was: hold on to your luggage, because just watching it isn't enough, and don't ever let yourself be distracted. And I hope that if I ever see anything like this happening to anyone else, I'll be quick thinking enough to stop it as the people on the bus did for me.

A Travel Tip

After many frustrating hours on the internet, I have discovered the following useful fact.

If you want to travel from Italy to anywhere in France, or from France to Italy, do your research at http://www.trenitalia.it/ . While the SNCF site will only tell you about the 2 trains a day that run from Paris direct to Milan at times that no sane person would want to travel, Trenitalia gives you all the options, including journeys with changes in Switzerland and Germany. Even more bizzarely, on the Italian site, you can research journeys from Milan to cities in France other than Paris, while the SNCF appears to believe that no foreigner wants to go anywhere other the capital.

So take heart, mes amis de la France profonde: Paris may be too self-absorbed to acknowledge your existence, but the big hearted Italians still care. Un abbraccio a tutti!

A Very Sad Post

Before my nearest and dearest start to get worried, I should say that this post is “sad” in the sense of “totally uncool”. Nothing tragic has happened to me.

While you may all have the impression that I spend my life meeting the rich and famous and enjoying the style culture of Italy's fashion capital, the truth is that I spend many of my evenings sitting at home drinking cups of Sogni d'Oro (“Sweet Dreams”) herbal tea and reading expat blogs on the internet.

(Slight tangent: it's amazing how many expatriates seem to think that that they are “expatriots”. In my experience, living in another country has the exact opposite effect: my national pride swells every time somebody tells me my country is beautiful and tears well up in my eyes whenever I hear “Scotland the Brave” used as a ringtone on somebody's mobile phone).

Anyway, one common topic in these blogs is the frustrations of using local public transport. While these frustrations can be many, so far in Milan I have experienced nothing but joy as I hop on and off buses and trams and no longer have to read the map every time I take the metro. So here's a post in celebration of public transport in Milan.

The first good thing about it is that it's frequent. Trams run past the end of my road every seven minutes at peak times and every 15 minutes on Sundays, and they go from 6am to about 1 in the morning. They even travel the whole route after seven in the evening, unlike buses in my dear home city. Metros come as often as every 2 minutes and, although I live on the less-frequented half of a fork in the line, they always seem to be going in my direction.


The second great thing is that it's cheap. In a city where renting a one bedroom flat costs 900 euros a month, a ticket, valid for 75 minutes on every kind of transport, costs one euro. For the price of a single ticket on the London underground, you can travel for two days in Milan.
So, in a country with a reputation for tax evasion, a poor economy and corrupt politicians, how do they do this?


Well, in my opinion, it may have something to do with the fact that many of the trams look like this:


If the people at ATM need to make a bit of cash, these historic vehicles may be painted to look like this:



The powers -that-were in Milan never removed their tramlines or overhead wires. The money isn't being spent on digging up the roads and putting back tracks that were there to be used a few decades ago. They haven't used their taxpayers' hard-earned cash to replace all the old trams with vehicles that look like bullet trains but still get stuck in traffic jams. Instead, they use older vehicles and run them cheaply and frequently.

Citizens of Edinburgh, read this and weep :-)

On a Mountain High

After my tranquil day recovering from the cold on Saturday, Sunday was the day of my big adventure. I joined a mountaineering club a couple of weeks after I got here and I'd been looking forward to the first trip ever since. We climbed the Cima della Crocetta, which is in the Gran Paradiso park in Piemonte, about 2.5 hours drive from Milan.

The club is organised differently from the ones I know at home. People meet at set points across the city to get on a full size coach and everybody does the same walk, which is usually organised by two people. While that makes it difficult to enjoy the vast solitude of the mountains, for me it was really nice because I got to meet lots of new people, all of whom were friendly and most of whom were men with names beginning with L (seriously: I met 2 Lucas, 2 Lorenzos and either a Luigi or a Ludovico, I can't remember). It also really reminded me how great it is to be able to speak Italian living here: although there were a couple of people who could have chatted in English if I had needed them to, it was much, much easier to get to know people and feel like one of the group. Without understanding Italian, I doubt I would even have got past the website to signing up for the group!

The walk itself was pretty tough. We climbed about 1250 very steep metres and, although we only really stopped for lunch and one break, it took about 8 hours. I felt really tired and a bit dizzy towards the top, but I think it was because it was about 2 o'clock in the afternoon and I had hardly eaten anything since breakfast at 5. I thought I would feel really stiff today, but in fact I was fine, so I can't be as unfit as I thought I was!

And apart from that, I think the pictures tell the story better than words can!

Love Story

I first fell in love at the age of twenty - one, somewhere in the middle of Eaglesham moor at a time in the morning when no civilised person should have been there. It was January and my boyfriend of the time and I, members of the Ryanair generation and yet to become familiar with the term "carbon footprint", were driving to Prestwick airport to catch a 99p early morning flight to Milan in order to fill the dead days of January with some Italian culture.A few hours later, I fell in love all over again. Milan, as promised by my cynical guide book, was grey, dirty and, much of the time, as empty as the floorspace of the designer shops that lined its streets. And yet I loved it. I spoke my ten-week-old, learned-in-evening-class Italian and people smiled and understood. Nobody spoke back in English and nobody seemed to look down at our scruffy, British student clothing. We climbed to the roof of the cathedral and saw pairs of pigeons in love. We drank the world's best coffee and discovered Nutella filled croissants. He was delighted by the cannons at the fort in the old town of Bergamo, while I admired the view of the Alps that stretched out hazily into the distance.My relationship with that boyfriend didn't last, but the one that I began with Italy grew and grew. For the guidebooks, Milan may not be the real Italy, but for me, that holiday was enough. I wanted to come back. And back. And back.Now, after several years of summer flirtations, I have come back for a year. I have taken a job here in Milan and I intend to experience Italy to the full. It may well be the biggest test our relationship will ever face, but it will survive, and this blog will be our story.