Opera in Milan, snow in Venice

Before I start part 2, let me take a second to tell you about the hostel in Florence. It was called Hostel Sette Santi, and it was right next to a church of the same name. In fact, it used to be a convent. Walking in the entrance it looked fairly modern, but the breakfast room was pretty awesome--it still had the long wooden tables with wooden chairs. The rooms were pretty normal too. My room had only four beds, which was really nice, and I got lucky having good roommates (Meghan and Victoria, the two girls in the picture). But, some odd things for an ex-convent: our overhead light didn't work; the one working light in the room only turned off when you unplugged it; the bathroom was disgusting; AND the bathroom was co-ed, even the showers. In general it was pretty quiet though, which was really nice. The worst part, though, was that on New Year's Day, two of the sinks in the bathroom were filled with puke. It was one of the most disgusting things I've ever seen, made even worse by the fact that the toilets were literally five feet away. Why couldn't you have stumbled just a little further, eh, drunky?

Now on to Milan and Venice.

Milan

Day 10

• All three of us slept in, and then went to the train station together. I scrapped my plan to go to Cinque Terre because it would have taken too long to get there and I would have only had about two hours of sunlight to walk around, then a long train ride to Milan. We all ended up getting on the same train, and Meghan and Victoria got off to change trains and go to Venice, while I went on to Milan. It was nice to have some company, even if only for a little bit. In Milan I saw

• The Cathedral (I didn't go inside because it was closed, but it was still pretty cool. The weird thing, though, was that the front was covered by an advertisement...)
• Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II (An old and nice, but rather small, shopping center. Most of the stores in there are big-name expensive ones, like Prada and Louis Vuitton. Apparently it's been used as a model for many other malls.)
• Teatro alla Scala (I just saw it from the outside, and it's actually not that impressive. Still really exciting to see it though!!)

Day 11

• Slept in a little bit, then went back to the cathedral to see if I could go in. I decided not to, since it cost money. After that I went back to La Scala to see if the ticket office there was open, so maybe I could get a ticket. It was closed, but it said the official ticket office was in the Metro station. When I got there, a woman told me that if I wanted to get a ticket for that night, I could go give my name back at the theater, because they were selling 140 partial-view gallery tickets for 12 euros. I hurried back there, and was really lucky to get on the list--I was number 120 of 140. The guy told me to come back at 1 PM. After that I walked to
  
• Castello Sforzesco (Pretty ugly, actually. I had no desire to go inside, so I just walked around the courtyards for a little bit. I walked all the way through to the back, though, and happened upon this thing they were calling "Snow Park", where people could go tubing and skiing down these big ramps that look like those ones at fairs where you slide down on a burlap cloth. The ironic thing? It was actually snowing that day.)
• After I ate lunch, I went back to La Scala to stand around and wait for my name to be called. While I was there, I ran into the woman I'd seen before, who thankfully spoke very good English, and told me what was going on. She said this round was just so they would call all of our names to see if we'd showed up. After that, we had to come back again at 4 PM, where they'd call our names again then give us vouchers for tickets. After that, we had to wait in line until 4:30 when we could finally buy tickets. She said she'd done this before and that usually you only have to come back at 1 PM, but since it was the last show of the first opera of the season, they were practically making people beg for the tickets.
• The way they called the names was crazy! All 140 of us had to crowd around this old guy yelling out last names (in Italian, mind you) and somehow we all had to indicate that we were there. I feel like there are so many ways to make the process more efficient, but I think it was designed to see just how desperate we were. The best part: when I first gave my name I had to show ID (I guess to prove that's who I really was) and since it says Pennsylvania on the license, he wrote down "Laura Smith Pencilvania", and then called that out when he called my name. After that I walked down
• Via Torino (supposedly a street where there are tons of big-name stores, but I hardly saw any. It was pretty much like any other shopping street I've seen in any other city.)
• San Lorenzo Maggiore (I walked past this church and was going to go in, but decided not to because there was a crazy guy sitting on the steps singing opera at the top of his lungs.)
• Navigli (My guidebook told me that this was a really nice section of Milan with canals running through, and that it looked like Venice, but it didn't. It was ugly.)
• Sant'Ambrogio (This church was really cool. It had a ton of mosaics inside that were really nice, as well as the 1600-year-old body of S. Ambrogio...on display.)
• After all that, I killed some more time until 4 PM and just walked around a little bit. At 4 I went back to La Scala to wait for my name to be called. This time it was a woman calling the names, and she just said my last name. It sounded like she was saying "Smeet!" But I got my voucher and then waited in line for 30 minutes, since of course they couldn't open the box office right after the vouchers had been given out. By the time I got my ticket it was 4:45 and the opera started at 6:30, so I pretty much had time to eat dinner and come back.
  
• The opera!!! (The opera was good, but my seat was not. Where it was, I could not see one inch of the stage. I ended up walking around to the back of the theater where I could see the whole stage, but then of course I couldn't see a subtitle screen. I tried looking off a few other people's, but most of them had Italian. Eventually I was able to find a spot where I could see the opera and read English, but it involved standing up. I wasn't really looking forward to doing that for 4 hours. By the way, the total time of the opera was 5 hours and 20 minutes: 3 acts of 1 hr 20 mins and 2 intermissions of 40 minutes. Those Italians take their opera seriously. I had to leave after the second act because the metro stopped running at midnight and I would have missed it if I'd stayed for the whole thing. I'm really glad I went, but I would have enjoyed it a lot more from a seat that I could see the stage from. But how many people can say that they've seen "Tristan and Isolde" at one of the most famous opera houses in the world?)

Day 12

• This day mostly involved getting to Venice. I got in around 2 PM, but then I had to get to my hostel. When I went to the tourist information office, I met a girl who asked me what hostel I was staying in. When I told her, she asked if she could come with me since her hostel was already horrible. She told me she was from Australia, traveling around Europe for a few months after her graduation. She ended up staying at my hostel, in the bed above me. She was really nice though. She seemed to be one of those rare Europe-travelers who actually cares about seeing stuff, rather than getting drunk every night. Once I got settled in, I went to
• San Marco Basilica (Amazing inside! Unfortunately it was against the rules to take pictures and they seemed to be strictly enforcing it. It was covered in mosaics, but they had the lights dimmed really low so it was kind of hard to see them. I would have liked to spend more time in there looking around, but there were so many tourists that I kept getting pushed along.)
• Ponte Accademia (I ended up here by accident. I was just wandering, trying to find a way to get to the church on the other side of the canal. While I was walking, I saw a bunch of cool stores. All the stores I'd hoped to see in Milan were in Venice instead. I window-shopped for a while, looking at the amazing clothes, and eventually just followed the line of tourists. There was a nice view from the bridge.)
• Santa Maria della Salute (really cool from the outside, not that exciting on the inside. This seemed to be a trend in several Venice churches.)

Day 13

• I woke up early to be able to cram stuff into the day. On the boat I met a girl who was also in my hostel, and she asked if I'd like some company for the day, so I said yes. The odd thing was, she didn't seem to like me very much. She seemed nice enough, but we never really seemed to click. It was fine walking around with her because we were both only really interested in wandering around. Some things we saw:
• Ponte Rialto (bridge over the Grand Canal)
• Fish Market (smelled extremely fishy)
• Exhibition about Vivaldi (I'd briefly looked at it the day before, but this time I read all the info. I had no idea that Vivaldi had even lived in Venice. It actually had never really occurred to me that he was Italian. It said that he originally became a priest, but was never satisfied with it and was always trying to do stuff with music. It also said that even though he was an excellent composer, since he was born not very well-to-do, pretty much all of his music undertakings were so that he could earn money and live well. There were also a couple cool instruments there, but the instrument exhibit at the Accademia in Florence was better.)
• The store that made the masks for Stanley Kubrick's "Eyes Wide Shut" (the masks really were well-made, although I'm still not sure if I think they're cool or creepy.)
• Murano Island (where the famous Venetian glass is made. Here I bought a necklace and a bracelet, both made out of glass beads.)

Rome

Day 14

• My last full day in Italy *tear*. I got up super early to take the train to Rome. I even paid 15 euros for a seat reservation so that I could take a faster train and get to Rome two hours earlier. Of course it ended up being half an hour delayed. So glad I paid that extra money. It also ended up being the worst train ride. There was a group of American girls who confirmed every stereotype that everyone in Europe holds about Americans. They were college-age, probably traveling around after a college trip to Europe. I can tell you practically their whole life stories. They go to Hofstra, some of them are seniors, and according to them, there were people even more obnoxious than them on the trip. They also were cursing loudly, despite the fact that there were families who spoke English riding with small children. And since I had 4 hours to contemplate why they were so annoying, I finally figured it out. They never asked questions about each other. Their entire conversations consisted of trying to get a word in edgewise....to talk about themselves. I think that's what really gives Americans a bad rep. There are plenty of us out there who genuinely care about seeing a new place and experiencing the culture and language--but there are also Americans who think that everyone should speak English not because it's a common language, but because they speak it. They expect things to happen for them just because they're American. OK, end of complaining.
• In Rome I visited:
• The Baths of Caracalla (One of the most famous baths in Rome in its time. Many of the artifacts found there are some of the most highly prized of Ancient Rome. I was lucky to see many of them at the National Archeological Museum in Naples, which apparently has a better collection than I realized when I was there...)
• The Capitoline Museum (Not gonna lie, kind of boring. I was exhausted after a long day of travel, plus this was about my 15th museum displaying ancient sculptures and pieces of broken stuff. There are only so many fragments of broken vases that I can be interested in. I did, however, see the famous statue of Romulus and Remus (which was kind of creepy) and a thousands-year-old statue of Marcus Aurelius.)

And thus ends my Italian odyssey. The next day I went back (which, let me tell you, was also an adventure: it involved a bus, a metro, a train, an airplane, another train, yet another train, then a car ride). I had a great time and I loved being able to travel around, but I'm also glad to be back. When I think about it, though, it's pretty cool that I was able to plan this trip completely on my own and actually execute the entire thing. I didn't even need anyone to drive me to the airport. I'm pretty proud of myself, especially since I speak very little Italian.

Enough patting myself on the back. Time to plan for my next adventures: Barcelona in February, Amsterdam, Paris, and Belgium in April (hopefully), and Madrid, Lisbon, and Sevilla in May! In between I hope to go snowboarding, take a weekend trip to Prague, another weekend trip to Vienna, and who knows what else? I need to see more German cities too! Otherwise what am I living here for?