Milano per un Giorno

Ciao!

In earlier posts I mentioned how all the exchange students get a GA for all the trains; well because of this fabulous little card, you can go to Milan and back really cheep. So being the adventurous exchange student, I decided to take advantage of this, and went to Milan for a day with some other exchangees. Milan. For a day. How cool is that? I just can't get over how close everything is here!

In order to make the most of our day we left at 5:30. AM. Waaaay early. When we arrived in Italy we found out that there was a one day strike going on (I'm positive that I'm a bad luck charm or something when it comes to trains and public transportation in general), but the main subway and bus lines were running so the we were told we shouldn't have any major problems. More on that in a little. So off we went to the center of the old town, in the heart of Milan. There are two great things to do in Milan: shopping and seeing the cathedral. It's amazing how much cheaper everything is in Italy, hence the great shopping. However, I was good and stuck to the other great part of Milan, seeing the cathedral, o and a third  thingI forgot to mention, eating gelato. :) We had a great time walking around, and it was all around a great day. So back to the whole strike thing. Well, our train left Milan at 7:30pm so we decided to head back around 6:30, giving us plenty of time, since it had only taken 15min to get from the train station to the center of Milan. We arrive at the subway station, and it's CLOSED. Ok, "no problem" we'll just take a bus. Guess what else was shut down? Yup, only 50% of the buses were running. So at this point we're desperate and are trying to hail a cab, but of course because of the lack of public transportation there are none to be found. Finally we get a cab to the train station, but at this point we had missed our train, the last train back. Great. However, because of the strike the very last train back to Switzerland was late, and we ended up making it by one minute. But the drama wasn't over yet, because while this train would get us back into the country, it didn't go anywhere near where any of us live, and it was going to get in around 1am, so there wasn't anyway to get to where we live. Fortunately one of the other exchange students host parents was nice enough to drive to the town where we were in Switzerland and let us all sleepover. So we survived, but I'm telling you, I think trains hate me. I'm not sure how many more of these strikes I can go through haha. But o well, that's part of traveling. :)

Here are some pics from the trip:

Early, early, early

Dumo

The "we have no idea how we're getting home" face

Survivors