Milan

Sam and I arrived in Milan pretty early. Probably around 10 am. The bus from the airport (I nearly wrote plane station) took about an hour and I slept most of the way. Sam had a list of things to do before we had to leave in the afternoon and so we got on that. He wanted to see La Scala (one of the most famous Opera houses in the world) and the Pinacoteca di Brera, an art museum.

We went to the Duomo first. It's odd. In German and Italian, the word for Cathedral is Dom or Duomo. In Spanish, it's Catedral. I assume that Dom and Duomo are physical descriptions of the buildings, while Cathedral and Catedral are descriptions of the buildings purpose. They mean "church of a bishop." Anyway, it's built in the late gothic style (according to Wikipedia, but I know enough to know it's built in some sort of gothic) and is around a century old. It's basically in the center of Milan. The church is really big and unlike other churches (Stephansdom in Wien) it has no large tower. Sam and I wanted to climb it, anyways, and you could for about €5 so up we went. We were both expecting the normal small observation room but that's not what we got. Instead we got to climb around the entire roof. There was so much room up there. And there was a spire, but we weren't allowed up. It was nicely decorated, though. It was one of the coolest things about Milan, that roof.

After we climbed the church, we went for some food. We found this little restaurant and had lunch in the street. I had some coffee (espresso), as well, and it was some of the best coffee I've ever tasted. Then we went for a walk. We found La Scala and went in (after the Brera, but I'll talk about it now). We went through the museum and saw instruments and a poster advertising Rigoletto - the story of Crazy Joe Devola (maybe not the Joe Devola part). The best part was that we were allowed to go into the actual theater and see the inside. It was so beautiful. Much more so than the Staatsoper. The Staatsoper has got a thing to learn about decoration from the Italian Opera houses. We weren't allowed to take pictures, though, which was a bummer.

We went to the Brera before La Scala. The Brera had a lot of old italian painters. The most famous painting they had was Raphael's Marriage of the Virgin, which had a whole bunch of pissed guys breaking sticks. There was some legend that the man who would marry Mary would have a stick that sprouts flowers. Sure enough, in the picture was Joseph with a sprouting twig. It was very strange but we watched a video about it (which was conveniently in the room of the painting) and the video unmasked much of the mystery behind Raphael's work. Seeing this painting also spurred us to see if we could find works by all of the Ninja Turtles. It was a quest that continued throughout our tour of Italy.

We also went to a church that we saw while we were lost looking for the Brera. I don't really know anything about this church except that it was pretty old (go figure, I'm in Europe) and pretty cool. It seemed like after it was finished the first time, the people weren't satisfied and kept adding onto it. The result was a weird hodge podge of building on the outside but a very pretty and cohesive inside. All in all, a very nice church.

And that's what I saw in Milan.