Milan Central Station and Italian Night Trains

A view up the Via Vettor Pisani, toward the Milan Central Station.
Vettor Pisani was a medieval Venetian sea admiral who was very popular.
(Venice was one of the Italian city-state power centers.)

Eventually, I made my way back to the Milan Central Station to wait for the night train from Milan to Rome.  Fortunately, there were some stores in the Station.  I spent a lot of time browsing through shelves of books in Italian that I couldn't read and staring at bizarre Italian fashions.   Then I sat on a bench and watched Italians, which was kind of depressing.  It is very, very warm in Italy, as I may have mentioned before.  There are also lots and lots of homeless people.  As a result, there appeared to be people living on all of the grassy areas around station.  You literally couldn't have walked in a straight line across the grass anywhere around the station without stepping on somebody or their bags.  Loads of homeless people would also come and sit on all of the benches in the train station.  There were very few seats or benches in the station and I think that this was designed to try to limit homeless folks squatting in the terminals.  It did make it super inconvenient for folks who were waiting for trains.  For supper, I had something that was like a cross between a pizza hot-pocket and calzone at an outdoor kiosk, which wasn't too bad, and a gigantic bottle of water (it was really, really hot and thirsty work out there).

The very beautiful facade of the Milan Central Station.  I like the . . . Pegasus?  Pegasuses?  Pegasi? . . . winged horsies.

I went back to the train station a bit early for the train departure.  I was very hot and also very tired--I had gotten up  at 4 in the morning to catch the train, to get to another train, to get to the airport, to get to Milan.  I was also a bit worried about being able to find my way back because the the city was a bit confusing.  So I wandered around the station for a couple of hours.   The train was supposed to leave at a little after 10 pm.  However, as I walked around the station, I noticed that the departures/arrivals board had a lot of delays.  Then, my train got delayed.  Every half-an-hour or so, my train's estimated departure changed and the departure track changed three times.  I don't think that Italians are known as much for their strict punctuality and devotion to time-tables as the Dutch are.  My train eventually left after midnight.  One unfortunate aspect of waiting around all that extra time was having to use the restrooms.  They charged a couple of euros (a bit over $3) just to go in to them, which just seemed exorbitant.  One positive thing, while I was waiting, was that there was a Burger King in the station.  About midnight I was very hungry, and very bored, and I got a hamburger before I left, which was nice and homey and really hit the spot.

The interior of the station.  It is really beautiful in there and the ceilings were incredibly tall.

The night train was a really old model.  You had to sit in a little cubicle, with two facing bench seats that fit three across and were so close together that, when you sat across from someone, your knees touched.  It made for kind of a cramped nine hour trip.  Also (and I may have mentioned this before) it was very, very, very warm in the train.  I didn't take any pictures in the train so I thought that I would try to find a picture online, just to give you an idea of what they looked like.  However, when I looked up Italian night train pictures, there were loads (loads and loads!) of pictures of train wrecks, which I am glad that I didn't see before I took the trip!  I would have been extremely nervous, as well as hot, with a crick in my neck, and stiff knees.  I was in a little cubicle with five other people who, I gathered, were a married couple and their three adult/teenage daughters.  They were pleasant enough, but it sort of felt like I was crashing their party.  On the plus side, it was super cheap to take the train--it only cost about $55 dollars to take the night train, which meant (theoretically) that I got dropped in Rome at a super convenient time for my schedule and it also meant that I didn't have to pay for a hotel room and then waste a half-day traveling.

One of the exits from the Milan station.  Everything, but everything, was marbel.  Unfortunately, it was a bit dim in the station and my camera isn't very good, so all of my pictures were pretty blurry.

My very favorite person in all of Italy was the very kind, very helpful, pharmacist in one of the shops in the train station.  At about 10 pm Saturday night, I decided that dying from drug reactions as a result of translation errors was preferable to trying to survive through a whole week of allergy related misery.  Then that wonderful lady showed me which drugs were antihistamines and then told me how many pills to take when I came back five minutes later after I realized I couldn't read the directions in Italian.  I still don't know what I had an allergy to (or what drugs I took, or in what amounts, for that matter), but I was very, very grateful for those antihistamines.  They made all the difference in the world.  Now if only they had had anti-heat pills, it would have been perfect!  

Back

Well, I am back in the States again.  It was 100 degrees in D.C. when I arrived.  I was pretty ready to turn around and fly back the Netherlands where it was 65.  Then, on the drive back, we got stuck in an almost tornado that dropped dozens and dozens of trees across the highway.  It was an exciting welcome home.  But, now I am sitting on the porch, and it is less than 100 degrees, at least at 6:30 in the morning EDST (12:30  in the afternoon, my time) and I have a good buddy who was awfully glad to see me and who seems pretty content to just hang out.

Stuff I Missed . . .

Jael took pictures and left them with me.  Unfortunately, she deleted all of the really funny pictures of her before she did that.  But, in any case, I just looked through those pictures and found out there are some of them that relevant to stuff I already put up.

So, here, and with proper photography credits to Jael are pictures of St. Alban's Anglican Church.  Somehow, Jael, who took a total of about three non-food-related pictures the entire trip, ended up with more pictures of the church than I.

This a back-view of the church (with its steeple cut off).  It is from over the moat that
surrounds the Kastilette.  You can also see the very famous Gifeon Fountain.
Also, notice the swan sitting on its nest under the edge of the bridge.

St. Alban's Anglican Church

And, finally, a picture of me, in our hotel, on my side of the room which had a closet and the exit.  I would totally have won the "get out alive" race in the case of a fire.  Jael's side of the room only had a window with no fire escape.  I really did not remember Jael taking this picture.  I think that I have blocked it from my memory.

The Saga Hotel

Jael and I stayed at the Saga Hotel when we were in Copenhagen.  (I kept forgetting to take a picture of the hotel until the morning we left and then, inconveniently, there was a giant moving truck in front of it.)

 It was super-convenient because it was only a block and a half from the back entrance of Copenhagen Central Station (which you see here).  It was just a couple of minutes away, past a bunch of Asian groceries.

When we arrived, we got checked in with no problem but when we returned to the hotel after wandering around Copenhagen and having supper, there was a large group of French high-school students blocking the doorway which did not make us happy.  It turned out that they were on a school trip looking at Danish architecture.  The walls of the rooms were very, very thin and you could easily here the kids speaking in both of the neighboring rooms.  Fortunately, however, the kids were pretty considerate and we didn't have too much trouble sleeping.

The biggest problem we had was that we had to share the bathroom with all of those kids.  We saved a lot of money by getting a room without an en suite bathroom and, for the most part, it wasn't too big a problem but we did try to time things so we wouldn't have to wait in line.  The picture on the left is Jael by our sink (which was in our room).

And on the right is Jael, waiting down one of the many long, narrow hallways, waiting for the bathroom before we head out to sight-see. 

This little map (which shows the emergency exits), gives you an idea about the number of little of hallways there are but it really can't express it fully.  I was still turning down hallways in the wrong direction when we were trying to check out on Monday.

We were on the second floor.  The dining room, where they served an amazing breakfast, was on the first floor (the second floor by American counting).  Jael, who photographed almost all of the food we ate on the entire trip, did not take any pictures at breakfast but it was wonderful.  

This was our room key.  The little
Danish flag on it meant that our
breakfast was included.

They had three or four different kinds of really lovely bread and three or four different kinds of rolls--the kinds that are all hard and crusty on the outside and soft and smushy and flavorful on the inside.  After nine months of wishing for bread like we had in Germany, I can say that the Danes have done it pretty well.  They also had a bunch of different desert pastries, three different kinds of meat, really excellent butter, and two or three different cheeses.  They had some pretty fascinating (and complicated) cheese cutters as well--the cutting wires are on an arm that screws down as it cuts.  (I was looking for a picture of it to put here and found one here.  The picture is a ways down the post but you also get a chance to see what it is like flying into Copenhagen if you take a lot of pictures.)

Our room actually wasn't too bad.  We got it for a bit less than $45 per night (each), counting breakfast, which is pretty cheap, for Copenhagen and for the Scandinavian countries, generally.  Food and lodging are notoriously expensive up north, some of the highest in Europe just for staples, like bread. 

 This was the view out of our bedroom window.  People liked to dump their trash, loudly, into those garbage cans late at night and early in the morning.




This is the much cuter view out of one of the hallway windows.  There were painted cows and elephants all over the place and, at the Copenhagen Airport, when we were waiting for the plane, they had a whole shop that sold nothing but painted horses, cows, and elephants.


The sign said that it was a "national art expression exercise" or something like that.  All I know is that Brainerd had painted oxen up all over the place five or six years ago so we were totally on the avant garde, fashion-forward, cutting edge of art installations.  (Also, Rotterdam had painted horses up last summer, which may or may not be related.)

Hotel Bohemians

When I was in Prague I stayed at the Hotel Bohemians.  It was cheap, convenient, comfortable, and quiet, which is pretty much all you can ask for in a hotel.  The hotel is about 100 yards from tram stops in either direction and is on a fairly busy road, which made it seem reasonably safe, even when I was walking back late at night.  If you click on this link, you will see a picture and a map showing the relative location of the hotel.  In the photo, the tower in the distance is the Prague Castle.

I asked for, and received, a river view.  While it is not as spectacular as the view further up the river, it is still very Czech looking and there was a little castle (well, probably a little church) just across the way.

There is also a view of pretty pastel houses on the side of a mountain--at least by Dutch standards.

The hotel is a Soviet era building, so it is a little older but it is still nice and reasonably sized.  The hotel is actually on the second and fourth floors of a large building.  I don't know what the bottom floors are used for.  The hotel has the old kind of elevator--it was teeny-tiny with a maximum limit of three people.  If you had a really large bag, you probably wouldn't even be able to ride up with it.  I did the whole trip--Thursday through Sunday--with just my regular, small backpack which meant that I didn't have to worry about the elevator (except for the fact that it always seemed to land hard) and that I was really proud of my ability to pack light.  If you click on this link you will see a photo gallery for the hotel, including the rooms and the breakfast buffet (but not including the elevator).  In the picture on the top right of the "Hotel Interior" pictures, my room was the first door on the left.  I like European breakfast buffets.  This one had a couple of kinds of breads (and the Czechs do bread pretty well) cold meats and cheeses, honey, jam, and marmalade, real yogurt (it tasted like homemade yogurt), hard boiled eggs, pound cake, coffee, tea, and a couple of varieties of Tang.  They always had a radio playing in the breakfast area which had American music and American Christmas music playing, with Czech and German commercials and Czech newscasts.  One thing that surprised me, though, was that I never once heard "Good King Wenceslas" played.  I was going to ask if the Czechs like that song or if they had ever heard of it but I forgot.  But, since they played almost exclusively American Christmas carols you would have thought that they would have really liked a song about THE Czech king and patron saint.

I almost didn't stay at the Hotel Bohemians, though.  I almost stayed on a Botel, instead.  Botels (hotels on boats) are apparently pretty popular in Prague, since the Vlatav River goes right through the center of the city.  I passed at least four on my way into town every day.  I thought it could be pretty neat and kind of a unique experience to stay on one of those and the prices were comparable.  I decided not to go with a botel because 1) I was a little afraid that, if it was choppy out, I might get sea sick and I thought that would be a bad way to start each day and 2) in reviews  of the Botel I was looking at, everybody loved the experience and then would throw in things like "as you might expect, the rooms were small but the bathrooms were minuscule.  I was afraid I would get stuck."  And I decided that adding a claustrophobia attack to sea sickness just might take the fun out of the trip altogether.  Having been there and seen the locations, I am still pleased with my choice.  At least on my side of the river, to get to the hotel, you had to go down a tiny, narrow stairway to get to river level that looked kind of spooky and not very safe.  Also, the road that runs along the river is fairly busy and I bet that you can hear a lot of road noise in the Botels (in the Hotel Bohemians I couldn't hear any road noise but I was on the opposite side of the building from the road) which probably wouldn't make for a restful night's sleep.  Also, I think one of the big advantages to the Botel would be that, over supper (or breakfast), you could sit on the deck and watch the river and the city--which would be a pretty spectacular view, I admit--but I think you would need much warmer weather to make that worthwhile.  If you want to see what Botels are like, here are the websites to three of the ones I passed every day.  The Botel Racek is the one I had thought about staying at.  It has a virtual tour of the boat (which probably needs a lot of internet speed to make worthwhile) which you can see here.  This is the Botel Vodnik and this is the Botel Admiral.  Those all link to the English pages, so they should be pretty easy to navigate.

The African Inn

I am living in the African Inn, which is a large apartment building full of mostly foreign exchange students.

 There is a restaurant on the first floor of the building--I don't know if it is any good or not but apparently they do a lot of catering because you see a lot of "Meram" catering vans around.  The other picture above is a picture from the roof of the building (there are eight floors of apartments in this building so this is quite high).

I am on the 5th floor (6th floor American) and so have a pretty good view of a bunch of roof tops. There is a chestnut tree just outside, though, which is even taller than my window.

I am on Christiaan de Wetstraat and the back of the building looks out on the Afrikaanderplein, which is a large park area with playgrounds, bike parks, and lots of benches and things. It is very pretty.  They are filling the outside edges of the park with booths so I expect there should be a market or festival of some kind there sometime this week.  The cross street, which is about 50 feet north of my room, is "Paul Kreugerstraas."

I have a room, a kitchenette with two heating units and a refrigerator, and my own bathroom, which is pretty nifty, actually as a lot of the other apartments that Stadswonen has do not.

This is my apartment as you come in from the hall.  You can't really see it because of the light but the door is a really bright purple.

This is my room.  It is quite easy to be tidy when all you have is what fit in two and a half suitcases.





My kitchen is little-bitty and my bathroom is kind of industrial feeling but at least I don't have to share them with anyone and I have a place to cook for myself.  I think that I miss having a microwave way more than I miss having an oven.

 

There is a Bibliotheek (a library) at the end of the street too, which could be fun--they have English language books as well as Dutch language books and reading books in Dutch would probably be good for my language skills anyways--but it would cost €36 for a year's membership, so I will have to think about whether it is worth it or not--maybe I will just slip in and read the books there, in their comfy chairs, instead.

This is a very Muslim part of town as well as having a lot of immigrants.  Many of the shops have Arabic signage and you can hear people speaking Arabic when you walk through the streets.  I have been to one of the Arabic groceries because they had good looking oranges fairly cheap and because they also seem to stay open a lot later than the Dutch stores.  (It takes a little while to get used to everything closing by 6pm.)  It advertised itself as "100% Halal".  I hope that that is a lot closer to eating kosher dill pickles than to eating meat offered to idols.  They were really good oranges, though.  

The Hotel Benelux

My hotel is very close to where my apartment is, so I will be able to walk my luggage over with no difficulty. The biggest issue I will probably have with the move from the hotel to the apartment is getting my bags down the stairs here at the hotel.

The Benelux Hotel notes in its website that it does not have an elevator. Which was fine. I figured I could carry my luggage up the stairs if I needed to (although I was fervently hoping that I wouldn’t get a room on the 6th floor (7th floor American, because in Europe the 1st floor is the floor above the ground floor). I got a room on the 2nd floor so I only had two flights to carry my bags up. But what flights they are . . .

This is the flight of stairs leading from street level, where there is a café, to the first floor where the hotel office is.

 These are the stairs to the second floor, where my room is located. They are really, really steep. They are also really, really narrow. And really, really shallow. It is rather like climbing a ladder with a 50 pound bag.

 This is my room at the hotel.  It is tiny but it does have an en suite bathroom of sorts, which makes up for a lot.  The chair is folded up because when it is unfolded you cannot open the closet.  The room does have a TV but you can tell they feel kind of guilty about it because they put it as far out of the way as possible.






Dutch TV is funny because most of it was American TV shows with Dutch subtitles but with Dutch commercials.
My favorite commercial is a Burger King commercial which refers to the Whopper's "barbecue smaak" presumabely referring to its flame broiled taste.