Milano- and not Alyssa or the cookie.

Our time in Paris had come to a close, and we were off to Milano. We decided to be adventurous and take an overnight train. After navigating through the train station, we finally made it into our private car and were pleasantly surprised when the train attendent came by and gave us some goodies (toiletries, slippers, bottles of water, etc).  

During our trip planning, we (and by we, I mean Ryan) read that the dining car can get pretty crazy, so we decided to not mess with it and stopped by a grocery store and stocked up on bread, cheese, and vino. When we were all settled in, and the train was on its way, we started a movie and broke into our grocery store goodies. At some point during the night, we passed through the Alps, but it was too dark to really see anything. We pulled into the Milano Centrale at 5:30. In. The. Morning. Let me just say, that 5:30 am in Milano in December, it's dark and it's cold. As in there was snow on the ground cold. Luckily, our hotel was only a few blocks away, so we trudged on. Did I mention that check-in time was 2:00 pm? The desk clerk let us leave our bags and advised us to check back around noon to see and maybe our room would be ready early, depending if the current occupants checked-out early. Back out into the darkness and cold we went.

Almost 7 hours to kill and absolutely nowhere to go. Nothing was open, and we had no idea of when things would start to open. We headed back to the train station and bought a day pass for the metro. We went down to the Duomo and Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II. The Christmas lights were still on and the piazza was completely deserted, so it did make for some great picture taking. We wandered down into the Galleria and saw all the high end shops that would have been fun to go into had it not been so early o' thirty. Finally, shops were starting to open, and we ducked into a small café for coffee and pastries, which perked us up a little bit. 

Fast forward a few hours of more aimless wandering and metro riding and window shopping, we decided to take a chance to see if our room was ready, even though it wasn't quite noon yet, and it was! Praise jeebus. And then we napped.

Roused and ready to go, our only plans for the night was to see Da Vinci's Last Supper painting. After meeting up with our tour group, we took a tour of Castello Sforzesco. Although not in use now, it is home to some great art, including some wall sketches from Da Vinci as he worked on another fresco, and antiquities.

The Last Supper was ah-may-zing(!) and in pretty good shape for not being a fresco, but simply a wall mural and for being nearly destroyed by bombers during WWII. Of course no pictures were allowed, pretty much nothing was allowed outside of breathing, and that probably would have been restricted if it were possible. It was neat to find out that the painting is in the dining hall of the monastery, so way back when, the monks got to be in its presence for meals. Only groups of 20-25 people are allowed in at a time and only for 15 minutes at a time. It was truly a humbling experience to be in the presence of something that I have known about for almost my entire life. Of course, I went all Dan Brown and examined it for the hidden clues listed in the book.

After the tour, we made our way back to the hotel to wash up and then headed out for pre-dinner drinks and then found a small restaurant for dinner. The one thing that I really liked about eating in Europe was that the tax and tip is already built into the price. So for our dinner: 2 waters, a bottle of wine, a pizza, a pasta dish, 2 gelatos, 1 cappuccino, 1 caffé corretto (espresso with grappa) was 37 euro flat. 

 And that was our Milano adventure. Lesson learned? Book the hotel for the night before so that we have somewhere to sleep when we get in at 5:30 in the morning. Next stop- Roma!