In a foggy early morning hour, the trip continued further. I got a little stressed over the fact that our initial booking for a room in a deeply Italian business in a small suburb 30 minutes from the city of Milan got cancelled. So I had to organize somewhere to sleep in a matter of hours or otherwise we wouldn't be able to sleep that night.
Surprisingly on-time, our trip from Bern to Milan started at about 9 AM. We would be traveling with one stop, the latter part of the journey traveling on a regional train.
As soon as we entered the express-train I tried to book a different hotel. In a matter of minutes I found a motel close to a highway. The twist being, that we of course travel by train instead of car so we this option also meant we would have to walk 30 minutes to the nearest train station and then travel about 45 minutes into the city of Milan. What a bummer!
What a bummer indeed, because as soon as I booked the hotel my internet connection got interrupted and PayPal crashed. For PayPal, the booking and my money got transferred from my bank to the hotel. But as I saw on the booking site, the money wasn't there and the booking not confirmed. Damn. This calls for a cellphone call. I called the hotel and they confirmed the circumstance, but ensured that there were enough beds. So at least we would have somewhere to sleep that night. I decided to tackle this in person later, possibly having to double-pay until I got my money back from PayPal.
After small delays we arrived at the Milan central train station. This city is HUGE. Just traveling from the central train station to the nearest subway took us about 40 minutes by foot. No way around that, other than to rent a taxi.
But why exactly did my internet cut off in the train from Bern, I asked myself. Then I saw it. My smartphone had used roaming data in Switzerland, which meant i would pay per megabyte instead of using my Flatrate. This also meant I had no money left on my Prepaid sim. Having refilled that we finally arrived at our hotel.
This was a scary situation. Imagine yourself in a situation you've never faced before and in a country where language barriers are quite significant. I had an interesting thought in that very moment: "I would like an adult to handle this situation - damn I AM THE ADULT that has to handle this situation". This moment sticks to my memories even years later very clearly. I won't forget it.
We settled for double-paying and I even got breakfast for a slightly lower price. I later got all my PayPal money back, so everything was fine in the end. We were quite overwhelmed by the occurrences in that day and chose to just get something to eat, which you can see in the images below. The restaurant served only quarter slices of pizza and the employees only spoke Italian. That's a funny circumstance, and we had a lot of fun demonstrating with hands and fingers what we wanted to eat. Also the pizza was very authentic and delicious. That's why we decided to eat there the next day also.
The next day we were packed with high ambitions on what to visit. Below you can observe some images of the places we visited. Mainly we wanted to see the buildings, churches and museums in the city. Additionally we tried to see the famous last supper painting, but actually getting into the museum is quite hard and we didn't manage to. Apart from that we saw the Leonardo da Vinci museum, which inspired me quite much. I love seeing analogue and digital technology and always experimented with it in my childhood.
A very stressful but rewarding day took an end - a sad end, actually. In the evening after we ate at the pizzeria again, news reached us about Elisabeth II death.
A little lightening for the mood was the fact that I would get to see Monaco Monte Carlo on the next day or two and after several years of anticipation would get to see the racetrack where real F1 cars race and normal people walk the rest of the year.
