Visiting A Friend, Milan

Yesterday we worked at Botega Caffe Cacao and took it easy in the hot weather. After a few very hot and bad nights, we finally had a good night’s sleep again, except for the terror cats that felt the need to run around the room and also walk on our heads at 5 in the morning, but still a good night. Today we went to Parco Idroscalo to escape the heat of the city. We would buy some snacks and meet some of Naomi’s friends at the lake. Ayoush, we had met before, when we visited Naomi a few years back. He had also brought some friends to the lake and we would just swim and chill for a bit. After a fun day at the lake and a couple bottles of wine later, we decided to call it a day and head back home. During the goodbye’s the idea came up to go for a picnic the day after, so I would go and buy ingredients for a Dutch apple pie.

We left together with one of the girls and she offered to lend me her cake pan, so I could actually make the apple pie. We separated from Naomi so we could do groceries together and pick up the cake pan. We arrived back at Naomi and had a simple dinner while watching Killing Eve before we headed to bed.

Early in the morning Naomi and Julian tried to fix the home battery system and came to the conclusion that it was going to be a difficult task. Before they could come up with a game plan they went to a Brazilian Jiu Jitsu open mat in the city and I went and made the Dutch apple pie. I wasn’t sure if I had brought the right spice mix from The Netherlands, but luckily I had planned ahead and brought a full bottle, so I could make it according to my usual recipe. During baking I had to fight the two cats just so they wouldn’t get into dough, but I managed to keep them off the counter and was satisfied with my end result. Besides the pie we also got ingredients for piadinas and a bottle of wine. Julian and Naomi came back from their training and we got ready to leave. Julian sadly decided to stay home because he wanted to try and fix the battery system before he would come out for the picnic. Eventually Naomi and I left together and figured we would be the latest, my pie wasn’t cooled down yet and Naomi had a shower at lightning speed so we tried to be on time.

Upon arrival we were actually the first, by far. Ayoush arrived about an hour later and the others slowly joined in. To our surprise some other people joined as well and we had a great time getting to know each other. We were not the only ones to think of bringing wine and soon 6 bottles of wine had been finished. Apparently we sat in a free roaming area for dogs, and as the park got busier more dogs came to say hi. All of us were happy to see the dogs and some of the dogs even let us pet them. Soon, this happiness regarding the dogs changed… Bongo, a very big, very wet dalmatian ran towards us, and first we thought he just wanted pets, but soon we got why he came closer. Lillian had brought heavenly tasting empanadas, which Bongo could apparently smell. He soon grabbed the bag with about 6 or 7 empanadas in there and ran off throwing them all around to share with his friends. We were all sad the empanadas were gone, and Lillian felt bad because they had taken so much time to make. Bongo’s owner absolutely did not care about any of this and one of the guys we were with stepped up and grabbed Bongo to make sure he wouldn’t get to the pie or any other food. We quickly decided to move to another piece of grass where dogs weren’t allowed, Bongo came to follow us for a bit but luckily his owner now stepped up and got him away from us.

After all this chaos Lillian decided she needed more wine and some of them gathered in search of wine while the rest of us continued to eat. After about an hour, it started to slowly get dark and we were afraid the people getting wine got lost or something. But eventually they came back, we had a few glasses of prosecco and when it got darker we decided it was time to head back home and see how Julian was doing. We brought him the piadinas and he brought us the good news that he was able to fix the battery system! This took some stress off our shoulders and we slowly wound down to head to bed.

For the last few days we have mostly been working and had a casual day at the lake to escape the heat. Today it would be a bit cooler and Julian and I planned to go on a date in the city and have some time to ourselves. We slept terribly because of the heat during the night, so we were glad we decided to just take it easy today and do some sightseeing the two of us. We left Naomi’s apartment after cooling down for a bit and getting ready for the day. Eventually we left for our date later than we would have liked, but at least we weren’t as hot anymore. In the metro, a man was playing two flutes at once, while blasting Decpacito through a boombox. We were absolutely not pleased with this, since we had a terrible night, no breakfast or coffee yet and it was still about a million degrees outside. When some metro employees entered the metro we figured he would be kindly asked to stop his music, or be escorted out of the vehicle. But, we forgot this was not The Netherlands and in Milan it is apparently pretty normal and not a problem. Afterwards we could also laugh about it, but in the moment we were really annoyed at the situation, turned out we just needed coffee and breakfast to see the fun of it. We got out the metro and headed to Esselunga for some breakfast and a cold drink, walked around Brera for a bit and stumbled upon signs pointing to a botanical garden. We both love botanical gardens and followed the signs to the entrance in hopes entrance would be free or at least cheap enough to justify.

Entrance turned out to be free and we headed inside. We got all of the leaflets and headed into the garden. Due to all the trees and plants the temperature inside the garden was noticeably lower than in the city and we walked around the garden for a long time. There were plants used within the medical field that had some extra information on what they were used for and which part of the plant was used. We had fun walking around and learning about everything. After our walk through the garden we went to McDonald’s to plan out where we would head after leaving Milan.

At McDonald’s we ordered some coffees and planned our next destination. We quickly decided we thought it was time to leave Italy and head back to France. In the beginning of September we have a campsite booked in l’Ardèche and we are craving to be back in the mountains and in a bit of a cooler area than the big hot city. We found a village called Saint Chaffrey, a city with a McDonald’s, Basic-Fit, mountains, cooler temperature and at least two free park-ups. This was our ideal destination and after finishing our coffee’s we were going to Fort Sforzesco to visit the museum. However, when we left McDonald’s it was way later than we thought and we didn’t want to rush our museum visit, so we decided to go later this week. Instead we opted to walk to CityLife and see what we could do there. We knew a nice restaurant from our previous visit to Milan which, in our minds was close to CityLife so we thought to maybe have dinner there. When we arrived at CityLife this was however not where we thought it was, we somehow mixed up CityLife with Isola. This meant we had to come up with a different plan for dinner. Walking through the CityLife shopping district we stumbled upon a sort of food court or food market and figured that’s where we could have dinner. We finished our walk through the shopping district, while walking in and out of stores where we absolutely couldn’t afford to buy anything.

We got hungry and settled on Wagamama for dinner, enjoying the exotic food you can pretty much only find in cities, while we normally travel through smaller villages. It was a bit early for dinner so not many people were in the restaurant and we felt awkward sitting down after being brought to the middle of the completely empty restaurant. The server spoke very quietly and we had trouble hearing what he was saying. We ordered drinks first, which he thought to be confusing. And a few minutes later he came asking if we decided on food, we figured we would just go with it and order, even though we planned to sit down for a while. After ordering, not even 5 minutes later Julian’s ramen arrived, we were extremely surprised by the speed of this service. However, I had to wait 15 more minutes for my food… A positive note is that the food tasted phenomenal and we didn’t have to cook or do dishes ourselves for once. After we finished our food, our plates were taken away, and no question about dessert or the check came. We decided to patiently wait since we didn’t have any place to be, but after waiting for about 20/30 minutes we just went to the counter and asked if we could pay. The server was somehow surprised, but after paying we left and I still hadn’t had my dessert… I settled on buying ice cream at Carrefour, it was on discount and would only be €2,50 for 3 ice cream bars. At the cash register, I found out this discount was only valid when you have a membership, which I don’t, so I had to pay the full €5,-. It was however one of the best ice cream bars I ever had and we even had one to spare to bring home to Naomi.

Even though our experience at Wagamama was mediocre, we had a great day and were glad to have spend some time together in the city. Back home with Naomi we told about our day and headed to bed quickly.

Yesterday we worked at the CityLife foodcourt for the whole day and today would be our last day in Milan and we still had the museum in Fort Sforzesco on our wish list. Naomi had been there about three times at this point and we agreed to meet for dinner after Julian and I had been to the museum. Since it was still early we first watched some Killing Eve together and Julian and I went on our way just before noon. First we went to buy breakfast at Esselunga. This time the metro entertainment was better than the guy with the two flutes, now it was a younger man playing the electronic violin with his mother managing the donations and boom box. We arrived at Fort Sforzesco and bought tickets to the museum, for €5,- per person, you get access to all 8 parts of the museum with diverse subjects. The armory is always Julian’s favorite part of any museum and he explained all of the different swords and defenses with great care. We spent almost an hour in this section and I now know everything about swords, which I usually forget in a few days so next time in a museum he can explain it to me again and I will listen with the same enthusiasm as I always do. Another section contained furniture of different eras, designer chairs of 2010 is not something we’re particularly interested in so we walked through here quite quickly. We also saw some cutlery from different eras, up until 1980, which lets be honest, can be found in any grandma’s household.

The abstract visual art had some surprises. The most interesting being that an artist, specialized in making crab statues, died by being crushed by one of his gigantic (crab?) statues. This is a true story… After walking around for about 1,5 hours we figured it was time for coffee before entering the musical instruments section. It started raining as we ordered our coffee and luckily we were inside and could patiently wait until it was dry.

Soon we continued our way in the museum and we arrived at the musical instrument section. We had a competition going with who could find the instrument with the most strings, some instruments had so many strings they couldn’t be counted, it was fascinating. Then we arrived at the organs (the instrument, not the ones in your body) and there was one that could be played (from 1849!). Julian tried to show his musical talents (and absolutely failed). Somewhere between the organs a side path could be taken into the modern glass art, strange place for this display, but cool to see. In the basement of the Fort an Ancient Egypt exhibition could be found. We went in without expectations but were pleasantly surprised. A fascinating, but terrifying surprise being that there was an actual mummy on display. Rotten toes on full display… We didn’t expect this and were quite shocked to find out it was real. Besides the mummy we learned about their view on life after death and the architecture of pyramids. All in all a very successful visit and an entertaining day.

After the museum we had some time to kill, it was only 3 and dinner reservation was made for 7. We decided to go to Isola, since this time we would go to the restaurant we visited last time in Milan. In Isola we walked around the fancy shopping center and the park behind. This park was equipped with a calisthenics section and we got curious to see which exercises they thought to add. On our way to the park, Julian stepped on the grass and fell into a rainwater drain. The cover had the same shade of green as the grass and was not aligned properly with the well. The cover shifted under Julian’s foot and his whole leg fell in. Gladly he didn’t get hurt, but his shoes and pants got wet and he got stared at by a whole group of Italians walking by. We decided it would be best to let it dry in the sun and wait for Naomi to arrive before heading to Shoo Loong Kan Hotpot. We had a great last night and talked for a long time, after dinner Naomi went for about 16 servings of the free jelly dessert and we had about 2 liters of tea between the three of us. After dinner Naomi wanted to take us to her favorite bar in Porta Venezia, the bar where she allegedly takes all her dates. This turned out to be closed so we settled for the bar next to it and had some drinks to finish our time in Milan. The next morning we would head out early to cross the border to France again.