When the moon hits your eye... - June 12-16

Well, after getting a good night’s sleep after my harrowing 17-hour journey from Dallas to Milan, I’m almost, sort of, kind of, maybe ready for work. I’m not committing to anything though.

The week went well, I suppose, considering that once I got here I really didn’t want to be here. I usually feel like I wish I was home when I’m on these trips, but there was more to it this week. Perhaps it was the jet-lag. I was told it would probably catch up to me by Wednesday, but maybe I was experiencing little problems with it throughout the week, culminating with a BIG finish on Thursday. That’s when the jet-lag really reached up and smacked me. Anyway, despite my fatigue and my desire to be someplace else, home, I did get some work done. Probably not as much as I could have, but any little bit of work I get done in week one is work that I don’t have to do in week two.

I’ll mention a couple of things here. Milan is not the prettiest place in the country. Most of the residents have told me that there’s not really a whole lot to see here and that I should probably go visit Venice or Florence on the weekend. Now, that could just be a case of familiarity breeding contempt, but they’re not the only ones that say that. I bought “Italy for Dummies” before I left, and there’s not a whole lot in there about Milan. It’s the financial capital of Italy. It’s the fashion capital, too. In fact, someone said that our last week here is supposed to be fashion week. Someone else also said that fashion week isn’t until August, which makes both a little sense and no sense at all. August is typically vacation month – they say everything shuts down except for things like video and grocery stores. So it would be good for fashion week to be here in August because no one else is. On the other hand, no one’s here! Why would you hold a fashion show in a place where no one was at? See makes perfect sense and no sense at all. That being said, there are a few things out there to see, and I got a brief glimpse of them on Wednesday night. More on that later.

I usually include some sort of commentary on the drivers. I don’t know if I do it intentionally, but I will this time. I was told that driving in Milan was more scary than driving in London, Buenos Aires, or Mexico City. Wrong! Driving in Milan is actually almost sane. They’re reasonably courteous to the other cars, although there is still a sort of “me first” attitude like there have been in all the other places I’ve been. Actually, we kind of have that attitude in Dallas if you look at it. We’re always cutting each other off. Then there are the bikers. I’m going to lump all people that ride motorized two-wheel vehicles under this class. There are some bicyclers, but there are so few and they’re so slow that they don’t really count. In the states, at least in Texas, motorcycle riders have to be extra careful about their surroundings. We live in the land of big cars. It’s hard to see a motorcycle when you’re up in a Hummer. That’s not the case here. I haven’t seen anything bigger than your standard mini-van and very few of those. Most cars around here are probably the size of Honda Civics or Ford Focuses. They have some that are much smaller, like half the size of a Focus, called a Smart car. Wonder when those will make it to America. Anyway, they’re on the same level as the bikers, so that helps. What really helps is the sheer number of bikers. Ok, maybe you could miss the bike ahead of you, but there’s no way you could miss it, the one behind you, the one passing you on the left and the one passing you on the right. And you definitely wouldn’t miss the one that slipped in between you and the car in front of you while you were stopped at the light! I feel like the bikers are like that guy on the bridge in Spiderman who told the Green Goblin that if he messed with one he messed with all of them.

So Wednesday we went downtown to where all the touristy stuff is. I don’t really know why, since I was already planning on going down there over the weekend. We saw il Duomo and the Parlour of Milan. We had dinner outdoors at this little restaurant. More of our dinners have been outside than inside. The weather is perfect for that. I wouldn’t even consider having an 8:00 dinner outside at home. That’s just crazy talk. Anyway, I’ll revisit the tourist stuff in another entry. The sights deserve some love of their own.