2014-day2

Elizabeth's summary of day 2 - an awful lot of sitting and and awful lot off walking! Explanation:-

If 8 and a half hours in the plane sounded like a lot on Sunday - try 12 and a half from Hong Kong to Milan! HK airport never ceases to amaze with the immense size and numbers of people. We pre-booked the lounge at the airport as we had 6 hours stop-over so enjoyed a shower, beer, dinner etc for a few hours before the plane left at 1.00AM. I  actually slept for 7 hours which was great but Elizabeth didn't do quite so well but not too bad. Knee and tooth OK!! 12.5 hours sitting is still a lot thus part of the summary above. Flying into Milan is one of the most beautiful sights when flying and it was further enhanced by clouds with the snow-covered Alps emerging above the cloud cover. Beautiful and spectacular.

The "walking" part of the above summary came next. Train easly caught from Malpensa into Milan (26 minutes) with  "10 minute  walk" to the Genius Hotel - except we had two incorrect directions from locals and spent an hour and a half with our luggage "exploring" bits of Milan we didn't really want to. Finally found/off-loaded lugggage and then (exhausted) set off for our usual "hop-on-hop-off" tour to get an overview of the place.

Impressions of Milan? - magnificent buildings and monuments and hopeless traffic. Growing on us. Didn't realise that the Monza GP was on this past weekend. Papers are full of it and apparently Ferrari didn't do so well - following appeared in local paper:

"Crisi Ferrari - Un disastro completo, inammisibile, delorosso" - get the picture??

The buildings are really beautiful - the Duomo quite magnificent and HUGE with beautiful parks and gardens everywhere. Going for the walking tour on Wednesday so will see more then.

Tonight lovely local cafe for fish/salad tea with local Chianti - beautiful./ Early night to get back into "equilibrium" - we hope. Off to Lake Como and Bellagio tomorrow for day tour.

Some pictures onto  facebook I hope - learning that one.

Trivia: The "Castello Sforzesco" in the centre of Milan looks VERY similar to the Kremlin - no accident as the architect of the Kremlin actually copied it!

Ian's Cap count: still in tact but was returned by waiter from  "Cafe Dante" as we were leaving without it!

Cheers all - hopefully some photos on facebook!