On March 29th Lindsay and I caught a train to Amsterdam Central station, where we prepared to board the overnight train to Milan. This was the start of our week in Italy. The agenda was to spend a few hours in Milan, then 3 days in Rome, 2 days in Florence, and 2 days in Venice. All our travel was by rail.
Our overnight tickets were dirt cheap: 39 euros each. The downside was that we were going to be spending the night sitting upright; 39 euros doesn't buy you the luxury of a bed.
However, we discovered to our delight that the train was divided into small cabins of six seats each, and that we had the whole cabin to ourselves. Now THIS is the way to travel!
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The title of this post is simply aesthetic; there was nothing "express" about the train. We stopped at many stations along the way, at all hours of the night. I wrote down the names of the cities in my notebook: Utrecht, Eindhoven, Emmerich, Cologne, Bonn, Koblenz, Mainz, Frankfurt, Mannheim, Karlsruhe, Offenburg, Basel Bad, Lugano...
At Frankfurt our pleasant ride became less pleasant. We were joined in our cabin by a younger couple from Texas. A bit later on two more ladies (Italian) joined us, and suddenly our cabin was quite full.
At the Italian border we were harangued by Italian customs officers who were unconcerned by the fact that it was 4 in the morning and we were trying to get some damn sleep. At one point we actually had to vacate our cabin to let in drug-sniffing dogs, which I think was mostly due to the tattoos on the Texan guy's arms.
Finally, at 7:45 in the morning, we arrived in Milan!
Milan is known as the business and fashion capitol of Italy. The area around the train station was quite modern-looking and, well, uninteresting. So we boarded the metro and headed downtown for the kind of stuff that North Americans come to Europe for.
You know, stuff like this:
That's the Duomo di Milano, the second largest church in Italy (don't worry, you'll see the largest), and also the second largest Gothic cathedral in the entire world. Work on it started in the 14th century and has never really stopped. It has a capacity of 40,000 people. Pictures don't do it justice.
Lindsay noticed in particular all the unique statues built onto the sides of the building, and she was on to something: I find out now that it's the largest collection of marble statues in the world.
There is a large plaza (in Italian, "piazza") that stretches out from the cathedral. It was full of pigeons, and a one point a local came up and started forcing birdseed into my hand despite my protests. Suddenly a flock of pigeons descended on me, literally, and ate out of my hand. Then the guy started asking me for money, which I refused to do. Italy was going to be a lot like Istanbul in that respect.
Attached to the piazza was the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, a 19th century shopping arcade that still impresses. Today it has many high-end shops and Asians with cameras.
We emerged on the other side to find a statue of some guy named Leonardo Da Vinci, who apparently is well-known here.
We had a bit of time left before our train to Rome departed, so we set off for the Castello Sforzesco, a 14th century castle complex that now houses museums. (You can see its tower in the distance as we walk down the street.)
Our train was leaving at 11:15 and it was now 10:00, so we decided it would be wise to head back to the train station to give ourselves plenty of time.
In the metro station I looked up at the display board. "Lindsay," I said, "the clock on that board doesn't say 10:00. It says 11:00."
We both checked our cell phones and watches; all of them told us the time was 10:00.
"Did we cross time zones?" she asked.
"No, I know we didn't! I checked before we left!" I replied. "Wait a minute..."
I remembered that, on the night before we left, Lindsay had said something about daylight savings time coming into effect soon. It takes place in Europe at a different time than in North America.
Sure enough, as we were on the train from Amsterdam to Italy, the clocks had set forward by an hour. Even though our train ticket told us we would get off the train in Milan at 7:45, we actually got off at 8:45.
Well. We missed our train to Rome.
We spent the next 20 minutes talking to officials at the Milan train station who spoke only rudimentary English. One of the guys had a nice smile and seemed to be in a good mood; as it turned out, he was in a good mood, and wrote on our tickets that we missed our train due to an error by the train station. We just had to get on the next train to Rome and show the message to the ticket collectors when they came by. We got lucky!
However, it meant we had no reserved seats during the trip, and the train completely filled up in Bologna. So, we spent most of our trip to Rome sitting in the doorway of a train carriage, reading.
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