A Dull Day

Summer is officially over in Milan. I know this because the communal central heating in my building has been switched on. I don't know if the date for this happening is fixed by law (it wouldn't surprise me) or decided by the resident's association of the building but whatever, a couple of days ago it was 23 degrees outside and the radiators were becoming tepid. I noticed this, hoped that they would get properly warm once the weather actually got cold and having no control over the situation, thought no more about it. Today, however, it's actually cold and, because I didn't realise that the warmth in the flat was coming from the radiators and not the glorious sunshine, I went out with only a thin jacket and ended up buying a cheap cardigan in H&M because I was so cold.

I didn't have definite plans for today, but, having spent most of last weekend working, I was looking forward to this weekend. Waking up this morning, I thought about all the possibilities for the day: shopping in town and coffee with friends, a trip to Lake Como, a visit to a nearby monastery or going Pavia, a pretty town not far from Milan. I texted a couple of friends to see if they wanted to meet up, then, feeling optimistic, headed into town to look at a couple of promising shoe shops that I saw last week.

As usual, I did not find shoes that I could actually wear for a whole day in any of the shoe shops.

Friend no 1 phoned to say that she was in bed with a hangover and would need several hours to recover.

Friend no 2 texted to say she had already gone off on a day trip with some other friends.

Tired of the crowds and brash consumerism of Milan, I decided to go to the monastery and the pretty town for the afternoon. Unfortunately, when I got to Lambrate station, I discovered that the Trenitalia website had lied to me and that the train had left 2 minutes before I got there. The next one wasn't for an hour and I was in no mood to wait.

Lambrate station is near the edge of central Milan, not far from the city bypass and not particularly near anything that you would want to see. The only vaguely interesting thing in the area was the Parco Lambro, the one big park in Milan that I hadn't yet been to, so I decided to go there.

I walked through some not very pretty streets in the direction of the park, stopping to buy some cold pizza from a grumpy woman in a bakery on the way. It was further than I thought and all I was hoping was that it wouldn't turn out to be some gravelly wasteland populated by dog dirt and men in trench coats.

The entrance didn't look to scary and so I proceeded deeper into the park.
It was then that saw it.



A hill!

It was the first one I'd seen in Milan and I think it may be one of only two in the whole city. Almost worth travelling 15 metro stops for. Unfortunately, it had some dodgy looking guys sitting near the top of it, so I decided not to climb it just then and carried on through the park instead. With it being officially winter and everything, it was pretty empty. Most of the people I saw were guys out running and the only women I saw were accompanied by big dogs. If I'm going to feel safe and satisfy my need for green spaces in Milan, it looks as if I'm going to need either a sex change or an Alsatian.

The park has a river running through it, the Lambro, and it would all be very nice if the river didn't smell like a drain and have grey foam floating on it. I walked around for a bit, then went back to the hill. The dodgy guys had gone, so I climbed to the top of it and took a picture of the view from the top.



Then it started to rain, so I climbed back down the hill and came home.

The End

La Cucina Inglese

For the past two weeks, I have been leading an English conversation group, which is made up of diverse, interesting and well-educated people. This week's group included an older gentleman who had lived in England and spoke "rather good English". You can tell that he was older (not quite elderly) from the fact that he used the word "rather" in conversation. I describe him as a gentleman because when I asked for his opinion of British cuisine, he first asked, "What kind of answer do you want?" and because on being told that I wanted an honest answer, he replied that it was sometimes very good.

He then said, "What I liked the most was the eggs. You can eat eggs every day in England."

Now, I have spent a long time trying to explain British/Scottish food to foreigners. I often tell them that we have nice roast meat and delicious baking for afternoon tea. Recently, I have started mentioning to Italians that our butter is better than theirs. I think I will add the story of the old man and the eggs to my armoury.

I also mentioned to the group that, because I work in an English language establishment, I also have trouble finding opportunities to speak English in Milan, especially as all the Italians I meet want to practise their English. The same gentleman told me, "You should insist on Italian. Tell them that they have to pay for English." My opinion exactly, but having heard it from such a nice, well-mannered gentleman, I will now have the confidence to put it into practice.

When a Girl is Tired of the Metro...

I took the metro last night. Got on at my local station, used up another journey from my “carnet”, travelled a few stops on the red line, changed onto the green line at Cadorna, knowing instinctively which direction to take, and got off at Moscova to go to the cinema.

Somewhere along the line, I realised that getting the metro was no longer exciting for me and perfect, elegiac, Chekhovian notes sounded in my ears. Metaphorically, at least.

(For those of you who didn't devote a portion of your youth to studying Russian literature, I should explain that the beauty of Chekhov's plays lies in the way he so perfectly expresses languid regret for the passage of time and the feeling that nothing ever happens, even when people are going around shooting each other.)

So why was this happening to me, at the age of 26, somewhere under the busy, buzzing metropolis of Milan?

Because for me, sad as it may seem, underground trains should mean excitement. They belong to the great cities of the world. For me, the smell of Paris is not Chanel No 5, it's the scent of the stale air that wafts into your nostrils as you descend into the Metro. When I first went to France in 2002, I took the Eurostar and heaved my suitcases on to the Underground to be whirled across London, passing under boroughs and districts whose names I only normally encountered in the Times. Mastery of the French language was signalled by my ability to pronounce Barbès-Rochechouart without hesitating and experience of France's capital by knowing instinctively that Ligne 4 goes from the Porte de Clignancourt to the Porte d'Orleans. Being a jaded Metro traveller was symbolic of becoming too used to being abroad.

And to some extent, this is true. My first experiences of Italy, although coloured by breathtaking scenery, wonderful, kindly nuns, exquisite cuisine and crazy drivers, were somehow not as novel my first experiences of France. I supposed by then I'd already learned how to be a foreigner. Most of the people I went out last night with were students who were having, had just had or were about to have that “first time abroad” experience and I was a tiny bit jealous. Moving to Milan has been a lot like moving to a new city in the UK, apart from the fact that if I make a special effort, I can go out and speak Italian to some people. Aside from the fact that I now gesture manically when I speak, I don't think this year will change me the way my first year in France will. It's a little bit sad that that rite of passage is, well, past.

Anyway, before I start sounding like a dead, melancholy Russian playwright, I should say that the film (Burn After Reading) was excellent and so was the live comedy duo that took the place of the trailers(!). They were two guys from London taking the piss out of Italians and Brits travelling in Italy. The only joke I can remember that makes sense out of context was “the traffic lights in Milan are only there for decoration” but if I go and see the full live show I'll tell you some more!

The Anti Cheese-Post

Now that the empty bottles of DOC wine are starting to build up in my recycling pile, I am embarking on a new avenue in my exploration of the gastronomical pleasures of Italy: cheese.

This, however, is not a post about cheese. Instead, to pre-empt the feelings of intense jealousy that you will no doubt feel when I do post endless lyrical paragraphs about the delights of all things caseic (I had to do a reverse dictionary search to find that word – isn't the internet amazing?), this is a post about Italian butter.

Which is pallid, insipid, bland, colourless, flavourless, looks like lard and doesn't even have salt in it to make up for the lack of any other flavour.

Two weeks ago, I made a batch of shortbread to take to Verona, using ordinary supermarket butter. It's still in a box in my cupboard. I couldn't even bring myself to eat it myself, never mind give it to my friends as an example of fine Scottish cuisine. It's that bad.

Today I went to the supermarket and paid 2.87 euros for a packet of Lurpack lightly salted. Visitors to Milan, don't bring me baked beans or Marmite. Bring me Kerrygold.

Italians don't eat much butter. I don't know if this is because the butter is bad, or if they don't bother to make the butter good because they don't eat much of it.

Or maybe they just keep all their good dairy products for making cheese :-)

Mammone, Mammone

The worst thing that I've ever heard my dad say about the Scots is that we are the only nation that actually aims to live up to the stereotype of itself. (This is actually not a very terrible thing to say, given that all through our childhoods, every time he drove us over the border to visit my lovely English granny and aunties in the pretty town where he grew up, he had to put up with us making rude comments about how the air smelled bad now that we were in ENG-LAND.)

I suspect that my father is probably right.

With this in mind, I feel well qualified to comment when I see anybody of another nationality doing the same thing. I don't know if Italians actually aspire to it or if it's just that the stereotype is so obvious and therefore easy to spot, but anyway, in the spirit of jovial national rivalry rather than serious criticism (I don't really think the air smells worse in England either) I intend post about it on the occasions when I see it.

Like this morning.

I was walking to school this morning behind a family group consisting of a boy of about 12 who obviously enjoyed his pasta, his slightly younger brother, who looked like the kind of child who is never off the football pitch, and their mother.

They were going to school. I could tell they were going to school because of their massive schoolbags, which all Italian children take to school from the age of 5 onwards. They need them to put their playpieces in.

So, the boys had these massive schoolbags.

Which the mother was carrying. I looked for broken arms, broken legs and evidence of wasting diseases, but there were none.

Enough said.

Sasso Cavallo

Yesterday I went on what was possibly the most stunning walk of my entire life. I was going to say “most beautiful” but then my national pride rose up and stopped me. I don't mind saying, though, that Italy does “stunning” better than any other country I know. I don't think the pictures even do it justice – I think I need to find the “bright sunlight” setting on my camera!

The walk was in the mountains above the Lago di Lecco, which is a branch of Lake Como. As soon as we got out of Milan, we could see the mountains in the distance, and at 7am, it was only a two hour drive.












On the way home, though, it was a different story. One thing that I find strange about Italy is the way that the most naturally beautiful bits of it are so full of people. It's as if somebody took the Highlands, put them somewhere withing commuting distance of London and added a whole lot of sunshine. (The population density of Lombardy is 372 per square kilometre, while in the Highlands, it's 8!) It's not a bad thing as such, but it takes some getting used to. In Scotland, you can come down from the mountains on Sunday evening and your biggest problem is likely to be a flock of sheep that won't get off the road. In Lombardy,you will encounter the entire population of Milan returning from their weekend retreats and have to queue for an hour to get on the motorway.

I reckon what the mountains in Italy need is more bad weather, single track roads and a whole lot of midges.

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 :-)