La Vita E Bella: Felice quarto di Luglio!

Happy Fourth of July from Italy! I am currently celebrating America by listening to country music, while sipping at red wine and blogging about this surreal experience. Lisa laughed at me when I attempted to write a rough draft for this, but luckily she understands my "writing process mind" being a teacher and all. So here goes my first blog free write...

We are officially in Milan! Our brief visit to the city of Zurich was more than expected, especially when considering we weren't sure we'd be able to squeeze it in at all. We had a four to five hour layover at the Zurich airport, and had to consider getting through customs on the way out and security on the way back in. Fortunately, we were able to pull it off, grabbing a quick cafe lunch, snagging a few photos and even napping at the airport before our next flight!

Milan has been a neat, yet challenging area for us to explore. After departing from our train, we immediately opted to walk the 15 minutes it was predicted to take us to arrive at our homestay. The task was a little more daunting considering none of the roads appeared to have names, it was 80 degrees out and we had luggage weighing us down. However, we eventually made it, thanks to Lisa's map reading skills and the discovery that road names are actually printed on the sides of buildings. This has not made maneuvering around the city much easier because the road names change at every intersection, regardless of if you are continuing on straight or turning. Even so, it has been good to brush up on the traditional map reading skills, and has certainly been a nice reminder of what it's like
to get around without GPS! Here are our quarters for the weekend...

The Italians seem to be very timely, despite a seemingly more laid-back lifestyle. Our trains always depart right on time (like no lie...to the second, as shown on clocks displayed at every station). Unfortunately, they are also very timely on their cathedral closings, which Lisa and I sadly found out on our way to check out the "Milan Cathedral," or "Duomo," as they say here. We arrived precisely at 6:35, and they closed precisely at the same time. Ugh. We made up for it, heading over to enjoy our first Italian dinner, followed up with GELATO! (Which we plan to have on a daily basis).

As we walked back home, we encountered a group of street performers, parading their way down the street. We took a moment to reorient ourselves and found the "Parco Sempione," a gem in our minds...not only because it was a beautiful park, but because we had a running location for the next day! We had heard that people seldom run in the major Italian cities (or at least they receive strange looks when they do), so we were thrilled to see people out running around!