FRANCE: Last Minute Journey to Italy

Since my last blog entry, I am feeling much, much better. The morning of Uncle Nou’s funeral I decided to skip class and write about how much he meant to me (some solid advice from Micheline). After I was done, I forwarded a copy to my dad and asked him if it could be read at the ceremony. Even though I couldn’t be there, I wanted to be a part of it somehow. My brother ended up reading it (Thanks Tommy!) and my Aunt Nancy decided to put it in the coffin with Uncle Nou. What an honor. After letting out how I was feeling and how much a valued Uncle Nou, I felt more at peace. After being cooped up in the hospital, and then in my house, and being so upset about Uncle Nou a trip to Italy is exactly what the doctor order (figuratively of course).

Elita and I decided to plan this crazy adventure to Milan, Italy on Wednesday and we left Friday afternoon. Craziness! It was completely last minute but ended up being one of my favorite weekends thus far. It all started with Emma cutting Elita’s hair at the train station. Random, I know. Then we took the 5+ hour journey to Milan. It was interesting to compare the difference between Italians and the French and see the stereotypes appear right before our very eyes. The train from Grenoble, France to Chambery, France was dead silent. Yet the trip from Chambery, France to Milan, Italy was the opposite. Italians were having super loud conversations all around us. The language is incredibly beautiful and I kept getting lulled to sleep by the melody of their words. Every now and then I could pick up a cognate (a word that is Italian but also English or French), but I basically couldn’t understand anything, which reminded me of my experience of Franglish in high school living on the Canadian border. We chatted with two Italian men sitting in front of us. They were adorable. When they realized we were foreigners they immediately started shouting Italian stereotypes of “pizza and spaghetti”. It was hilarious. I loved the accent. I swear I will learn Italian some day. They also were obsessed with saying “I’m sorry”. They kept accidentally hitting into us and then they’d say I’m sorry over and over again followed by a little giggle. Like I said, so adorable.

We got to Milan at around 11:30 at night. Although the guys on the train had told us we were in the middle of town, we definitely were not. After wandering around for two minutes we realized we were actually in an incredibly sketchy part of town. So, we walked back to the train station, wandered over to a bus stop, and asked help from a friendly looking girl who luckily spoke a little English. She began to explain to us that to get to the middle of town we needed to go back inside the train station and take the metro to Duomo (the stop by the magnificent church). Then another man rushed over and said, “I speak better English, I can help you!” Then he said the exact same thing but gave us a map and had a super long conversation with us about New York, California, Miami, and where we are actually from. I love how everyone I meet in Europe only knows about those three places. It’s very amusing to learn about how Americans are perceived.

So, we figured out how to buy tickets and take the right subway to the center of town. After figuring out how to navigate in a huge city where I don’t know a lick of the language, I thought about how silly it was to be afraid of navigating around Boston less than a year ago! We wandered around until we found a hotel. We walked in and asked how much it was for a room. It ended up being around 200euro. Definitely out of our price range! We were about to leave and keep searching when he started saying, I can find you a hostel if you’d like. He found us a hostel nearby, printed us out directions, and even called to see if it was full (they didn’t pick up, so we decided to risk it). I couldn’t believe it! Every single Italian we met was so friendly and above and beyond willing to help us. I began to fall in love with the language, people, and culture.

We meandered down the street and after a good 20 minutes found our hotel. It ended up being super confusing to find because it is hard to find the street names and there is no grid format to the city – it looks like a circle with all kinds of randomly assorted intersecting lines on the map. Also, the map didn’t have all the street names! When we got to the Ciao Bella, there was a huge party going on. We went inside and pushed past the people to the front desk. The lady said they were full up, but once again helped us out in finding another hostel. She also recommended we stay or return later for drinks. We declined and decided to take a taxi to the next hostel - Hostel Zebra.

For some reason, the hostel name wasn’t posted outside. So after wandering down both sides of the street for a while, we finally found it by peering inside a window and being overwhelmed by zebra print. We had finally arrived and were safely in our beds at 2 in the morning. What a way to start the trip!