Mini-sojourn in Milan

Visiting Milan was, as the Irish say, grand! We slept in Shannon Airport Wednesday night, because the first bus on Thursday morning would not arrive in time for our flight. We played banagrams, a game like scrabble that I highly recommend and each did individual reading or writing that we had for school. Upon our arrival in Milan, we went to find our hostel and then to find sustenance. However, the latter proved to be quite difficult, as Italians eat dinner late at night and the restaurants were closed. We found an outdoor cafe enclosed by a walled tent of sorts and ordered a pizza to split. After spending the weekend in Italy, I now know why that seemed odd to the waiter. When going out for pizza, everyone gets their own, and I'm not talking about miniscule personal sized pizzas here. Each person eats the equivalent of a size small pizza in the States. The crust is very thin, so we thought perhaps it wasn't as filling, and Mary and I decided to do as the Italians on Friday night and each ordered a pizza. That definitely wasn't the case... We both got 3/4s of the way through our pies and had to stop. When we hadn't eaten for a while and wanted the check, the waitress asked, "Why don't you mangia?" in a broken Ita-glish. She looked confused, but my stomache was the really puzzled one, wondering why I was forceably beating pizza into it. We were physically uncomfortable for hours. I have no clue how Italian women stay so thin, because they really do eat carbs all the time. Everywhere I looked, thin, beautiful women carrying slices of pizza for lunch on the go. Maybe that's the key, if you eat pizza while walking in stilettos you burn more than you consume. I'm guessing it doesn't exactly negate the pizza... We trekked over an hour on Friday to see The Last Supper, but to our dismay, you have to book tickets in advance and they were booked until the end of November. It was ridiculous, as no where was this "booking" advertised. They only allow groups of 25 into the room with the painting. I appreciate the necessity to preserve the extremely old work of art, but, please, put this information up on a website or on the tourist maps. Saturday, Mary and I went to an outdoor market for some bargain shopping. I could liken the experience to riding the 4/5/6 during rush hour. Despite the crowd, I managed to get a nice present. We then rushed into a store after being followed for over 10 minutes by an incessant Italian man attempting to get us to go out with him, which I'll neglect to detail, as it makes me extremely angry. The rest of the day was spent traversing the entire city, finding new neighborhoods, and more Milanese shopping and dining. Sunday morning, after much confusion as to how one enters the walled park, Mary and I visited Leonardo da Vinci's horse, a 24-foot tall, 15 ton, bronze horse built according to da Vinci's engineered plans. Leonardo built a clay model, but French soldiers destroyed in for target practice and his sculpture was never actualized in bronze during his lifetime. It was so beautiful and just awe-inspiring because of it's sheer size. It was time to leave Italy after seeing il cavallo, so Mary and I walked to the bus station to meet up with Sarah and Michelle. We had our last meal, yet another mozzarella and tomato panini, before departing. Yet at the airport, we decided it was necessary to have Italian gelato one last time before we left for Ireland, and I chose gelato con brioche- a pastry sliced open and filled with stracitella gelato. Mmmm. I loved visiting Milan, but my attempts at the language were laughable, as I'm so used to French pronounciation. I did, however, get to yell my authentic-sounding "statzeze" at the creepy stalker, but would have done just fine without that experience anyway. I mumbled "oh marone" a lot, in attempts to feel as if I were speaking the native language. Being there made me want to learn Italian; I am happy that I didn't study abroad there, only because of the inevitable weight I would have gained as a result from pizza, paninis, and gelato.