Free Travel {Italia}

This is an excerpt from my Travel Blog When we went to Milan Italy

March 1 2012 (wait.....its already march????) 

Ciao, meaning hello in Italian haha Ok, so i'll start at the beginning, this morning we all woke up and went out into europe as children...well we are now adults and let me tell you why.....FIRST of all our train this morning was leaving at 6:15...so we made plans to be ready to be on a metro by 5...well much to our surprise the metro doesn't even open till 5:30 and thats at the first stop....glaciere (which is our stop) is in the middle of the line....so were standing there out on the street at 5 in the morning in Paris.....trying to hail a taxi......we soon learned that waving your hand half heeartedly at the taxi would not make it stop for you....thankfully clay stepped up and got us one.....he was a real nice man and his car was super clean.....these are not typical yellow cabs but like......bmw taxis......so it was nice....we made it to the train station on time thank goodness...got on our train and headed towards zurich switzerland which was our stop where we had to switch trains....we get to zurich and panic sets in again as we did not validate our ticket from zurich to milan....only our tickets from paris to zurich....so we started looking for a validation stand and there was none to be found.....long story short if you get on a train without your ticket being validated then you are looking at a fine....and that was not what we wanted....luckily we had our eurorail passes and that with the ticket was enough...so off to milan right??? wrong....we were supposed to make it all the way to milan on this one train...there were no more scheduled stops....so imagine our confusion as the train stops at a station and they tell everyone to get off and get on another line....this was not the plan so we had to make sure that the other train was headed in the right direction.....we get on it and in fact it was right....we were finally headed to milan....once in milan we find out that the reason our train stopped was because the railway went on STRIKE haha which caused all of the trains to stop and all of the people needing trains to get in a really really long line so that they could get tickets for another time...we needed tickets to get to venice soooo we stood in the line but i had noticed that there were machines that would print your tickets so we went over to one....found out it would do english and ended up purchasing 4 tickets to venice for tomorrow, for only 17 euro each....we were very proud of ourselves....disaster avoided!!! now off to milan....finally..haha we got on the metro which is a lot shakier than the one in paris and found ourselves feeling a little paris homesick haha but we made it to the duomo which was our stop to find the hostel.....we walk around find the hostel (great great hostel) the staff are so kind and its just a really fun place!!! It's called ostello bello :) anyways we get settled and then head out....we go to the duomo and my goodness this is the most spectacular thing....if you think its big on the outside you will flip on the inside......its absolutely amazing!!!! after the duomo we get our first italian gelato....which if i must say is MUY BUENO :) sooooooo good....we got fragola i think which is strawberry and it was.....just sooo good :) after gelato we needed real food...we found a swanky italian restaurant and ate there...i had pasta with meat sauce and it was literally the best thing i have put in my mouth in a few weeks!!!! :) We ended the night watching downton abbey on the terrace of our hostel :) if you haven't watched that show watch it....its so good and were all addicted!!!! :)

SO....it's been crazy...we've had ups and downs but we made the best out of all of it and really ended up enjoying a wonderful day in italia :) Headed to venice tomorrow....will blog soon :)
arrivederci ;)
Emily