Manic in Milano

I'm going to try and get all of these posts put up before July.  I promise.  :-)

After the "Hotel Fire of 2011," we decided that Venice was telling us to move on. The next morning was kind of crazy, since our original hotel set-up shop in the lobby of our new hotel.  Suffice to say, many of the guests were pretty unhappy when they heard they couldn't go back to the old hotel for the rest of their stay.  We checked out and grabbed a free (provided by our hotel for the duration of our stay because the hotel caught on fire) taxi to the Grand Canal vehicle drop-off station.

 Like everywhere else in Venice, you had to cross a bridge to get from the drop-off to the train station.  Tim thought I was too slow going up the stairs, so he grabbed my bags and charged forward.  (This picture is zoomed in, he was pretty far ahead of me.)

 We had to get a picture of our hotel documenting the morning after...

 We had to say goodbye to our sunglass model...

 And get one last picture in this beautiful city.

 The train ride was about 2 hours, and during the ride, I tasked Tim with figuring out our plan of attack in Milan. He soon discovered that all of our guide books only had about 1-2 pages of information about the city. In fact, it was only listed as a "destination between Florence and Venice!"

Our first stop was the duomo...

Um, yeah, amazing.  

This beast is either the 2nd largest Cathedral in Europe or the 4th largest in the world, we saw both claims, but either way it was incredible. And you can climb to the roof! 

 Not so easy on a hot day! But the view was worth it...

 After climbing back down, we headed over to the Galleria. This was one of the first shopping malls in the world and today features stores for Gucci, Versace, Prada, etc, etc.

 In the center there's a very large mosaic with shields representing the major cities of Italy.  On one of these is a bull that brings luck to those who rub their heel in his ::privates::. It's been rubbed into a hole...

 We thought this picture was pretty funny...that's Louis Vuitton and McDonald's, both anchor tenants.

 We walked through the Galleria and found Teatro La Scala, or the grand opera house in Milan. AGAIN we got there right after closing and didn't get to take a tour. I did peak into the lobby from the gift shop and it looked pretty awesome.

 We decided that even though things were closing for the day, we would walk across town to the Castello Sforzesco to look at the grounds.

 When you walk through the courtyard, you end up in a large city park...

After resting for a while, we headed back to the train station to get our luggage and figure out a way to get to our hotel for the evening. Since our flight to Paris was so early the next morning and the airport was 30 minutes outside of the city, we booked a room at an airport hotel. We figured if we took the airport shuttle, we could just get to the hotel with their shuttle.  We just didn't know how to get on the hotel shuttle...

Luckily, once we got to the airport and wandered around a bit, Tim spotted the hotel shuttle and flagged them down.  They were a little confused, and we were in the wrong place, but they picked us up anyway. Our last night in Italy was spent watching The Simpsons and eating snack food, since there were no restaurants near our hotel! C'est la vie!

ON TO FRANCE!