RtW Day 20: Geneva, Nyon & Milan

Geneva++

So despite my dislike for the city, it turns out that I'd booked three nights in Geneva and not two. This came a great surprise to me when I tried to check out Wednesday morning and the woman at the desk said, "...but we have a booking for you for one more day. Are you sure?" Confused and worried that I might have booked two places at once, I checked my laptop. Thankfully, I'd just gotten my days switched up and no one was waiting for me in Milan that day.

However, now I was stuck with a new dilemma: what am I going to do for another 24hours in Geneva? I asked the woman as much, but another guest at the hotel answered for me in perfect English (I think she was American): "You should go to Nyon!" she said, "It's quite beautiful and only a short train ride away!"

Nyon

It seemed like a plan to me, so I tossed my stuff back up in my room and headed back out to the station, bought a 15€ ticket and hopped on a train. Exactly 15minutes later I got off the car in a tiny little town on the shores of Lake Geneva. The woman was right, it was beautiful. Imagine the Okanogan, but without the sand, dust and underbrush. Greens and blues and the sky came all the way down to the mountains, the mountains to the lake. It was absolutely stunning and a considerable change from the hole that was Geneva.

I wandered around for a few hours, looking for something open... not much really. This was a phenomenon I would run into a lot from this point on. I strolled through the town, encountering an old castle that had been converted to a museum, walked down to the water to get some sand from the shore for my mom, and then walked back into town looking for food. I found a nice little crepe place and had some tasty strawberry & whipped cream crepes for lunch. Then I wandered around some more, looking for some chocolate or ice cream (but hoping it wasn't too pricey 'cause I didn't have too many Swiss Francs left) and when I was done, hopped back on the train... there isn't much to do in Nyon other than that, but it's worth the trip if you can get out there.

The Trip to Milan and the Train Station from Hell

As appears to be a habit with me, I met a pretty Italian girl on the train who was happy to chat about Milan. Celine spoke perfect English, with a slight Australian accent, since she'd lived near Melbourne only a few years ago. She taught me how to say "I don't speak Italian" and briefed me on the transit system in Milan. She also warned me that seeing The Last Supper was a difficult task and that it was often booked upwards of two months in advance. Her advice was to get in on a tour that has pre-set tickets otherwise I'd miss it. It was good advice. The other thing she said was to be very careful in the central station as there were thieves everywhere.

When we arrived at the Central station, I started on my usual process of find map, find hotel on map, get to hotel and ran into a number of problems. First of all, "the tourism office" appeared to be an old lady who spoke only Italian in a newspaper shop. She sold me the worst map ever (fluorescent pink!) and 1€ transit ticket. The map was enough though for me to find where I needed to go and what trains to take. It should have been as easy as putting the ticket in the machine and getting on the train... not so much.

I found my way down into the underground station, passing dozens of merchants all selling the same crap off a white towel on the floor, as well as some obvious thieves, some beggars and some reasonably slick con men with decent English. I evaded all of them, walked right up to the machine, put in my ticket, saw the green light and... the turnstyle wouldn't move. I pulled out the ticket with at "wtf" expression and tried again, this time receiving a red light and still, the turnstyle wouldn't move.

Figuring I'd bought the wrong ticket, I walked over to the nearby ticket booth, bought another 1€ ticket and tried again with the same result. Frustrated and sweaty from carrying my backpack through the hot, crowded, noisy and dirty station, I marched back upstairs looking for an information booth. Surely, in a city as large as Milan, there would be someone who could explain this stuff to me.

There wasn't. The "information booth" is nestled under the stairs and the friendly man behind the glass spoke just enough English to understand that I had a subway ticket. "Downstairs!" he smiled, pointing the way. I wanted to transform into an Ugly American, smash on the glass and yell "I know where the fucking train is, you idiot! Why doesn't my ticket work?", but instead, I threw my hands up in the air and walked back down into the Underground.

I had a new plan. I would stand idly by and watch other people do it. There had to be something I was missing. I followed a guy from the top of the stairs, watched him buy a ticket (the very same one I'd bought), and walk over to the machine. I held my breath, what had I missed?

He slid the ticket in the machine, the light turned green, he removed the ticket, waited a beat and went through. You won't find that tip in any travel book: in Milan, the turnstyles wait 'till you remove the ticket plus a half second before you can go through... sigh.

The Really Awesome News

After that I found my way to the hotel with few issues. I purchased 24hours of internet, got clean, checked my mail and called my dad to talk for about an hour. We had a lot to talk about since he'd managed to book a flight to Rome for the last week I'm there. That's right, my Dad is coming to visit me in The Eternal City and I'm really excited. Doing all this alone has taken a lot out of me and it'll be great to spend some one-on-one time with my Dad before landing back in BC. He's asked me to "do all the religious stuff" before he gets there, so I'll likely visit the Vatican and protestant cemetery in my first week. The two of us will likely hit all the big spots like the Coliseum etc. It's going to be great.

Milan

Milan is a lot like Geneva actually. I mean this in the sense that it's dirty, noisy, built for cars and Lonely Planet is right when it calls its city centre "charmless". The transit system is cheap (1€/75min going anywhere) and convenient, but dirty, crowded, sticky, noisy and sports (a TPSC favourite) ads that talk on the waiting platform. I can't help but think that if they doubled the fare to say, 2€ they could get rid of the ads and clean up the station in no time... who the hell runs this city?

There are some nice things about Milan though. The tree canopy is a lot more impressive than even Vancouver's in some places. You can tell that someone, a long time ago, set about making sure that Milan would have a healthy amount of shade in the summer. It's not everywhere, but some of the streets are quite impressively designed. Then there is of course the Duomo, a massive church in the city Centre that took nearly 600years to build. Trust me when I say that the pictures I have (inside and out) do not in any way do it justice.

The City Tour

Celine was right. Trying to book a chance to see The Last Supper is pretty much impossible unless you're wiling to wait about 2months. The only way around it is to book a 3hour, 50€ tour that runs every day at 9:30 except Monday. Of course I only found out about this on Sunday afternoon and I have to be in Florence on Tuesday so... I booked a tour for Tuesday and I'll be hopping on the train not long after I've seen Da Vinci's work.

I'd like to point out here by the way that CitySightseeing Milano sucks. I had some free time today and for 10€ it seemed like a good idea to ride around on a bus with a multi-lingual guide. Well the multi-lingual guide is recording triggered by the intersection you're going through. You don't slow down enough to see what the voice is talking about, the "guide" often can't tell left from right and it regularly got cut off and then restarted when we came around a corner. 10€ wasted really. Yes, I'm bitter.

Fooding

I've been pretty excited about the food here. Frankly, Germany (well Berlin at least) doesn't have much to speak of in terms of local food. In fact, I often ended up eating Italian while I was there. However, here in Italy, nearly everywhere you go, if there's food, it's pizza, some pasta. I had considerable trouble with the menu reading though, so I blew 8€ on a dictionary and now I'm ready to try and read one on my own. Just remember: pizza margherita = good, pizza bizmark = bad.

Something else I found kinda odd but understandable once you see the prices is that just sitting in the restaurant costs you anywhere between 1.50€ - 3.00€. The bill is for "cover charge" or pane coperto, the theory being I suppose that you don't have to stay, you can just get take out. The restaurant across the street sells a margherita pizza for 5€ and it's roughly 17" around. However, once you buy a drink (3€) and pay for pane coperto (2€) the total is 9€ ($13.50CAD) which is pretty good considering the size of the pie :-)

I'll likely not be posting 'till after I've settled down in Florence, and by then my Nyon & Milan pictures should be up. Here's hoping Florence is nicer than Milan, or I might just have a break down.