First Day in Milano
By some miracle my plane was on time and Teseo was there to meet me. Sweet! You never know how these things will turn out especially since I couldn't ever get through to him via telephone, and when he'd try to call me he ended up having conversations with an old man in Torino!
He really does live in the center of Milano, so we dropped my bags off and his mother immediately offered me an espresso- perfect! She did it with a little perculator (they call it a mocha) and I had a seat out on their 3rd floor terrace and soaked it in. I can't believe I'm here!
Then we did a little mini tour of Milano. The Domo is only about a 10 min. walk from his house. We didn't go inside, hopefully tomorrow. We walked through the Galleria Vittorino with all the fancy shops and then ended up facing the famous Scala theater. From there we stopped off at the Tourist Office so I could get some maps and info; then we walked through the Castello Sforzesco (which also has museums I'd like to visit, and for free after 2PM) and ended up at a beautiful park for a little rest. Teseo had been out until 4AM that morning and needless to say, I didn't get great sleep at the airport. There is a neat exibition of 100 photos (taken from an ariel view) of scenes of Italy by Antoino Attini and Marcello Bertinetti. It took us about an hour to look at them all and read the captions. Of course I'm even more looking to visiting Josh and Marina in Florence this Feb. after seeing the pictures from that region. They were spectacular!
We came back, took a little siesta, and by the time we got up, it was almost dinner time. Jaco, Teseo's younger brother came to spend the night (he's studying psycholog somewhere else), so the 4 of us had a wonderful dinner. We started off with green olives from Naples and garbanzo beens with oil and herbs. BTW, they kept laughing at the word garbanzo ALL NIGHT! It was histerical; they call them "chey chi" (I have no idea if that's how they're spelt, but that's how it sounds). Teseo had done a salad with porccini (again spelling ?) mushrooms, another type of red mushrooms that are apparenly very expensive (80€ per kilo; I think that's about 100 US dollars per pound), parmesean cheese and celery. It was served dry and we added oil, salt and pepper ourselves. His mom had cooked Risotto Milanesa (just my luck!) and we added truffle butter on top. I'm sure you can imagine that this entire meal was right up my alley! We also had red wine and fresh baked foccacia and ended up the meal with a type of peccorino cheese (not romano).
Teseo had to jet off to work at 9, but I ended up staying up with his mom and brother until 2AM! They both speak excellent French and English, so communicating was no problem. It was a fun night. I had thought I might head over to the club where Teseo plays after midnight, but by the time I realized how late it was I decided not to.
I woke up at 10 this morning (ahhh sleep in a cozy bed is wonderful), took an espresso on the terrace with Jaco and wrote some letters. Teseo needed to really get some sleep, so I got out the maps and headed over to the National Museum of Science and Technology "Leonardo da Vinci". Many exhibits are free, but this one was well worth the €8 I paid to get in. I spent about 4 hours looking at everything and will have some neet photos to post once I get back to France. I'm not exactly sure what is up for tonight, but maybe I will venture out. Guess that's it for now. Hope you're all having a nice week! Happy Halloween. Ciao, Elizabeth
He really does live in the center of Milano, so we dropped my bags off and his mother immediately offered me an espresso- perfect! She did it with a little perculator (they call it a mocha) and I had a seat out on their 3rd floor terrace and soaked it in. I can't believe I'm here!
Then we did a little mini tour of Milano. The Domo is only about a 10 min. walk from his house. We didn't go inside, hopefully tomorrow. We walked through the Galleria Vittorino with all the fancy shops and then ended up facing the famous Scala theater. From there we stopped off at the Tourist Office so I could get some maps and info; then we walked through the Castello Sforzesco (which also has museums I'd like to visit, and for free after 2PM) and ended up at a beautiful park for a little rest. Teseo had been out until 4AM that morning and needless to say, I didn't get great sleep at the airport. There is a neat exibition of 100 photos (taken from an ariel view) of scenes of Italy by Antoino Attini and Marcello Bertinetti. It took us about an hour to look at them all and read the captions. Of course I'm even more looking to visiting Josh and Marina in Florence this Feb. after seeing the pictures from that region. They were spectacular!
We came back, took a little siesta, and by the time we got up, it was almost dinner time. Jaco, Teseo's younger brother came to spend the night (he's studying psycholog somewhere else), so the 4 of us had a wonderful dinner. We started off with green olives from Naples and garbanzo beens with oil and herbs. BTW, they kept laughing at the word garbanzo ALL NIGHT! It was histerical; they call them "chey chi" (I have no idea if that's how they're spelt, but that's how it sounds). Teseo had done a salad with porccini (again spelling ?) mushrooms, another type of red mushrooms that are apparenly very expensive (80€ per kilo; I think that's about 100 US dollars per pound), parmesean cheese and celery. It was served dry and we added oil, salt and pepper ourselves. His mom had cooked Risotto Milanesa (just my luck!) and we added truffle butter on top. I'm sure you can imagine that this entire meal was right up my alley! We also had red wine and fresh baked foccacia and ended up the meal with a type of peccorino cheese (not romano).
Teseo had to jet off to work at 9, but I ended up staying up with his mom and brother until 2AM! They both speak excellent French and English, so communicating was no problem. It was a fun night. I had thought I might head over to the club where Teseo plays after midnight, but by the time I realized how late it was I decided not to.
I woke up at 10 this morning (ahhh sleep in a cozy bed is wonderful), took an espresso on the terrace with Jaco and wrote some letters. Teseo needed to really get some sleep, so I got out the maps and headed over to the National Museum of Science and Technology "Leonardo da Vinci". Many exhibits are free, but this one was well worth the €8 I paid to get in. I spent about 4 hours looking at everything and will have some neet photos to post once I get back to France. I'm not exactly sure what is up for tonight, but maybe I will venture out. Guess that's it for now. Hope you're all having a nice week! Happy Halloween. Ciao, Elizabeth
posted by ecloern | Friday, October 27, 2006
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