Walking Through Milan

The first thing I noticed when I arrived in Milan was that it was very, very, very hot.  When I had left the Netherlands, it was in the low 70s.  During my entire week in the south, the temperatures where in the 90s and even in the 100s.  It made for a shocking transition.  The second thing that I noticed was that I was very, very, very allergic to something that was blooming down there.  By the time I found the bus to go from the Milan Airport to Milano Centrale--the main train station in Milan, I was having a terrible allergy attack and, besides being very hot, was very miserable.  If I seem unduly negative about Italy and Italians, please note that it may be more a reflection of heat exhaustion and terrible allergic reactions than a reflection of the actual culture of the place.  Although I did get attacked by more street people in Italy than in any other place I visited . . . 

This map shows the main things I saw while walking through Milan.  I have created a map with markers on Google maps.  If you click here you can see the street view of the city and can zoom in and look at the surrounding areas.

When I got to the central train station, I took the metro to the Duomo stop.  After I toured the Duomo, I walked back to the station in a round-about way, checking out various things on the way.  It was about two miles from the Duomo to the Centrale station but that is a really long way when it is practically 100 degrees out.

Periodically, around the city, there were public fountains.  Like lots of places in Europe, the water is potable and with the weather being so warm, loads of people were hanging around getting drinks, watering their dogs, filling water bottles, taking quick sponge baths (I kid you not).  Just FYI, Italians do not stand in lines well.  Coming from the Netherlands, where people stood in neat, well-spaced, orderly lines, it took a bit of getting used to.  Eventually, I was hot enough and thirsty enough to do the "shoulder your way to the front of the group" technique that seems to be the Italian modus operandi.  I wasn't quite brash enough to fend off the very sweaty, partially clad jogger who, literally, shoved me aside to get to the water fountain while gesticulating wildly and swearing (or possibly just chatting--it is kind of hard to tell in Italian).  But I did get to get water shortly after that.