Leaving

April 27th to 28th, Australia, Singapore, London.

The plan I had was to become insufferable before leaving. I didn't think it would be so easy. I've seriously had about twenty people come up to me so far and say they are jealous. Well, how do you think I feel?? I'm the one who came up with this stupid plan. I'm the one who decided to "follow the dream", run the flag up the pole and see who salutes, and basically taunt everyone with my knees-up running-around buggering-off to another country behaviour. There is a lot of pressure here. Thank you for your sympathy, mum. I figure you are the only one reading.

Don't worry Di, you're not the only one reading, I am too. And correcting the odd typo... Not that I'm paying much attention, being as I'm too excited/stressed...

The process before moving involved the delivery of Hal's worldly possessions to a storage unit once they had managed to make it off a ship. Closely followed by the majority of my possessions. The last week saw the final move of furniture and cleaning: Hal suffered the cleaning while I lugged the boxes. This of course was slightly delayed by the need to head to the Coonawarra for a wine tasting weekend. Wednesday saw a bit of rest and Thursday finishing off those fiddly things.

Don't talk to me about shipping firms. "7-10 days delivery for your air freight"... Never use Fox removals, that's all I'm saying. Grumble.

And Friday we flew to London, via Singapore, and then caught a BA flight to Milan. If you are wondering how I manage to survive a cattle-class flight to London, the answer is not very well, even with an exit row seat. The seat is simply not long enough, even with the extendable headrest. The company on the left was delightful! But of course! Unfortunately the guy on my right seemed to have little awareness of a number of social niceties. His habits included assuming that his space also includes 5 centimetres into the next seat, that halitosis was fashionable and definitely should be shared, that being unable to work out how to switch off your watch alarm that you cannot hear was endearing, and that good conversation began and ended with the ins and outs of Suduko puzzles. You win some, you lose some. The flight to Milan was comparatively less crowded, more comfortable, much shorter and unlikely to make the memory banks considering the two hours of sleep I got on the previous two. But enough of travelling.

I choose to start the adventure... now. So I'm buggered if I'm going to type anything more while Milano hoves into view.

Bored bored bored. Sick of flying, bored bored. Oooh! Mountains!!! Ruddy great mountains with snow on top and everything!!! Not clouds, but snowy mountains!!! Cool!!! Ooooh, non-descript sandwichy-thing, mmmm. *snore*

Milano (aka Milan)

April 28th to May 2nd

To be honest I really had no idea what to expect of Milano, in our first region of Lombardia. I had been told various things about the place including the fashion victim status of the locals and their inability to clean up after their dogs, and that the city itself is not very clean. This is definitely true. The streets are very dusty, although this could be because of the time of year. The favourite tree in the area, the mmble mmble thingy, seems to shed clouds of floating eye-irritants. Smokers know that Milano is their ashtray, and street cleaning would improve things but only if they removed the seemingly abandoned cars. That again could be due to the dust. Unless you are of course in the fashion district, where everything is clean and expensive. Footpaths are also convenient locations for leaving motorbikes and scooters (ciao!), and are usually gouged by stands. Or occasionally occupied by a car. Parking rules it would seem are merely suggestions.

The buildings in Milano seem to be fairly uniform with the majority being between five and six stories high, with a multitude of small balconies bearing flower boxes and shades. The majority of windows are shuttered, which makes the place, along with the dirt, look more like a war zone. This is also enhanced by the weekend that we arrived, nestled nicely between two public holidays. It seems that a large number of people have simply shut up shop and headed wherever they head on these breaks. Probably Como. We are staying for four nights at Hotel Brasil, to the east of the central city. This is one of the unfashionable ends of town. Rather than rosellas in the day and fruit bats at night, our hotel has a crow, which for some reason simply makes me think we are staying a misty cemetery.

After lugging luggage -- which seems vaguely apropos -- from the station to the hotel, we grabbed some lunch and a nap. Lunch -- and I wish to make this very clear, you will get a lot of informatin about food here -- was of course pizza, with ham and proscuitto shaved directly onto a base of cooked cheese and tomato sauce. The evening, after a nap, saw us wander towards central Milano, and back out, ending at a wine bar. A few broken words of Italian and lots of international pointing and we had a couple of glasses of wine, bresaola salad, a selection of local cheeses -- now there's a surprise -- and a selection of local salamis. We then performed the uniquely pristine sleep of the dead in pike position. Not a bad first day but not a very good paragraph: I think I managed to even bore myself there. And I didn't even get to the food on the second day (breakfast standing at an italian bar, lunch of primi and secondi courses of local specialities with a bottle of wine, comatose nana nap followed by a force march to try to get us onto Italian time, gelato and pizza). And so our days continue.

What we did manage to do was wander through to central Milano, to the Duomo and Galleria Vittorio Emmanuele II. The former has got to be one of most amazing churchs in existence. Taking something like four hundred years to build, the Duomo is imposing from the outside and breathtaking on the inside. It would probably have made more sense if I had received a catholic education, but the mystique of the place overwhelmed even the scaffolding surrounding it. Of course, it was being cleaned. Photos do not do it justice, but neither do my attempts at description, so you'll have to settle for photos. The Galleria was equally impressive, being one of the first buildings to be constructed mainly of glass and steel, and only marred by the Mickey D's located near the centre. A long, umm, what's the word... galleria ran away from the Duomo roughly towards La Scala Opera House. At the centre a shorter cross section met at a huge dome. I know a facade engineer who would have been looking at it in a completely different way to me: I thought it was pretty.

Oh, and we also managed to wander through Peck, one of the biggest and oldest deli's in the city. This has to be seen to be believed. Wheels of cheese, which left Hal drooling at the window, probably around 200 legs of proscuitto crudo strung up around the place, handmade pasta, pastries, chocolates, oils, truffles, and huge selections of meats. Downstairs had an ample range of wines, from the Wynn's Coonawarra John Riddock shiraz, that we had tasted at the vineyard less than a week before, and Grange Hermitage, to champagne tastings and methusalas of Pol Roger, to Hungarian dessert wines and an exceptional collection of Italian varieties. We had to leave to ensure that Hal didn't blow our entire budget, not that I would have stopped her.

Wandering the streets near our hotel didn't help us to meet anyone: they are generally empty, unless you are near the Duomo. However, wandering around one day to keep awake did bring us to a bunch of people. There was a bar set nicely on the corner of a triangular building and hence an intersection with six roads leading into it. Then there was a group of Polizei all primly dressed as only Italian police can do, carrying riot helmets. Then there was another group of Polizei similarly attired. When we woke up enough we saw a further two groups of Polizei basically surrounding this bar we were about to walk past. Oh good. Along with the locals sipping Campari were a large number of multi-tattooed, flag-bearing skin-head nationalists drinking beer. And here were we thinking Milan was full of posh types and financial types. I'm not quite sure why anyone feels the need to tattoo their knuckles and necks, nor did I have any inkling as to their attitude to non-Italian speaking tourists. Let's just say I still don't, but it did help remove those last vestiges of jetlag. And, no, we didn't get any photos.

May Day

April 30th evening to May 1st, Milano

When I left Australia I was informed in no uncertain terms that I needed to describe things that were bad as well as all the gloriously good stuff. And so I tell you about our Own Personal May Day, which for creative licence purposes I start when May Day started in Australia. The evening of April 30th saw us decide that seeing La Scala Opera house would be best achieved by trying to obtain gallery seating: sold, apparently, through the ticket office at 6pm on the night of the performance, approximately 140 tickets are available for the average punter. We were aware of this through a friend from work, and found out about the details from the theatre website. After shopping for the next day we bolted for central Milano. On the way we got lost and rained on. I got stared at by people in the queue for apparently being a freak and over 150cm tall, and the tickets were not produced as the performance was sold out. We did, however, manage to spend some time in a little bar around the corner drinking Averna and Montenegro and eating snacks while watching a squat gentleman scalp tickets in a language we barely understood. His dog was very nice though and didn't drool on my foot. Again with the freaking out Italians with having nipples higher than them.

On May Day itself we took our pre-purchased food -- clever heh? -- back towards the Duomo. This time we were planning on a picnic on top of the building: something that is completely reasonable. Our timing was again out, as we had an inkling of as we fought our way through the crowds bearing fake poppies travelling in the other direction. The stairs to the top of the Duomo of course were closed. We instead headed for the castle where we had our picnic in the grounds. The museums in the building were of course shut. By the way do not ever expect to find a toilet anywhere in Italy, especially after having a bottle of Chianti Classico with a picnic of bread, cheese, basil, tomato and proscuitto. How we suffered!

We headed back to the hotel, buying metro tickets on the way to find out later that it was free on May Day. Returning to approximately the same area later in the day we went to a bar that promised Happy Hour. This appears in Italy to be a selection of free snacks along with the drinks that you order. Except on May Day. Outside there appeared to be a couple of vans serving drinks and food, though, so we thought we would go for a wander. Apparently fast food in Italy from the sort of van that I was used to serving bad-tasting donuts and battered hotdogs on sticks (dagwood dogs in Tassie) involves toasted paninis instead. All the vans also served beer. And then we turned the corner...

In the circle surrounding the south end of the castle were probably a dozen vans. All had speakers on them and various people of radical tendencies mixing music at differing tempos but uniform volume. I am starting to feel old. Every young thing was drawn to this area, as though they had two giant magnets, one for dreadlocks and the other for facial piercings. Again, showing my age, why pierce your nose so that you have extreme trouble when you have a cold and generally look like livestock? Still, it was most entertaining watching the drunken and high youth. We continued walking around the semi-circle marvelling at small clumps of Italian future thrashing in front of a decrepid truck, and applauding the testosterone set as they attempted to either sap the castle walls or refill the moat a litre at a time like lemmings wearing down a cliff in a most public private display. If only I had a camera with me! Pissing on something that old in Australia would surely get you arrested, even with our liberal approach to drinking. We instead wandered home, refusing requests for my beer, marvelling at the fashion, drug-induced stupidity, and some enterprising person who brought out their house plants to soak in the fountain. Instead we opted for gelato. The Metro obviously was shut down and so we had to walk home.

The next day we dragged May Day out. We attempted to climb the steps to the top of the Duomo as we had attempted the day before. Instead there were lightning strikes and we just got wet. Time to leave this city of fashion, money and #$%^ing holidays.

Veleso, Lake Como

May 2nd to 5th

So we thought we would escape to wind down and escape we did. We caught the train from Milano to Como at the southern end of the left leg of Lake Como. From there we caught a bus to Veleso. Our direct bus apparently had a change in Nesso, which in a way was a blessing because the bus driver was a madman. Braking for corners is apparently less important than the european honking of the horn to let people know you are coming through regardless. All the time of course it was pouring with rain, the bus was fogged up, and I was standing: something that automatically gives me a stunning view on the world. Let's just say our first view of Lake Como was not so much favourable as foggy. The bus we caught initially was one to Bellagio. As I said we stopped in Nesso to catch our bus to Veleso. We were under the impression that we would be staying in a place that overlooks Bellagio in the hills, and from there had assumed that we would be able to, at a stretch, walk to Bellagio. The Hotel Bella Vista where we were staying, however, was 820 metres above sea level and hence something like 600 metres higher than the Lake. The Hotel serviced as the town meeting place, coffee shop and bar. Initial impressions were of Fawlty Towers with a seventies make-over. The hosts were lovely, the food was excellent, and after a couple of false starts we managed to hit on some very tasty wines too. The only problem: the weather. It was moving rapidly between cloudy to pissing down to cold and damp. Also not quite what we were hoping for, but it did force us to relax on our first day of escape.

The next day we were lucky enough to meet a couple of Australians, Rob and Maria, who gave us a lift down to Bellagio. We repaid this kindness by letting them know about the little bus-honks-before-coming-around-corner trick which probably saved us all a lot of time and trouble. We spent the rest of the day wondering around the streets and back alleys of Bellagio. Now I've been to the Bellagio Casino in Vegas and I can quite categorically inform you that the similarity ends with the name. Bellagio is quiet, content and full of old money, whereas the casino of the same name is noisy, drunk and about to acquire money. Both are full of Americans. We eventually headed over to the other side (east) of the peninsula and were greeted with a quieter scene, happier ducks, and a cat. Both sides are insanely beautiful, and, on that particular day, damp. We headed back up the hill to continue our process of becoming old and heading to bed by 9:30pm.

Friday contained more dampness. Actually it sodding pissed down, but we coped stoically, plodding through the rain and mud through some town that was older than us, my dad and my country combined: Nesso. Very pretty, nice bridge with installed gnomic fisherman. It's about this time when we really understood how the same all these towns are. Built on the verge of the lake, the only way to grow is up, and that involves terraces and buildings that loom. What else do can you do except eat fish and dredge up river-rounded stones to make impossibly uncomfortable pathways? Bastards. And all you get to drink is alcoholic beverages and coffee thick enough to chew. And all you get to eat is fresh bread with cheese and preserved meats. I long for the vague curries we used to eat at lunchtime at Pier 35 in Fishermans Bend. Okay, now I'm lying. If only the @#$%ing rain would stop...

We caught the bus back from Nesso to the hotel. The bus was supposed to go past the hotel, double back and head to another town. In the spirit of adventure we decided to make the walk from the second town back to the hotel. Unfortunately it started raining harder than usual, so we tried to alter our plan with the bus driver. He was having none of it, having decided he wasn't going anywhere near the hotel, on this trip. After arguing for longer than it would have taken to drop us off, we were driven to the neighbouring town, where the bus driver cajoled a passerby to drop us back at the hotel. This happened to be our waitress from the previous two evenings. "Ah!" we thought, safety in the familiar. And then she started driving. We thought the buses were bad, but we had just yet to travel with an Italian in a car. The trip was highlighted with a long, sweeping, blind curve where our driver honked the horn, crossed herself and accelerated. I can highly recommend this as a cure for constipation if required.

Como

May 5th to 7th

After realising the error of our ways we checked out of the hotel in Veleso, waited for the second bus of the day around twelve and headed back to Como at the foot of the Lake. We checked in to a hotel, marvelled at the bed on double format, and headed out for a drink. This was an adventure. It shouldn't have been, but it was lead by the totally indecisive one of us -- I'm not sure which one that is -- and involved walking around the delightfully flat streets of Como until tired and crashing what looked like a trendy bar. Now note, we are not what you could call the most trendy people, but on a good day with the wind behind us we can make a fair show. Some guy, on the other hand, had several women hanging off his extraordinarily skinny frame. Who can guess why? I was going to investigate closer but I got distracted and headed for the food.

It is probably important to point out at this point that there is an event in Italian culture called Aperitivo. This is as important as the ideas of the midday sleep, the evening walk, the dressing up and the lack of any concern of modern architecture. This involves paying a little extra for your drinks and thus having access to whatever buffet of treats have been presented. These treats do not involve the young ladies, of course, as I've worked out in Milano, much to Hal's amusement, that they simply stare at someone my height and wait for me to injure myself on some sign or bar ornament. The treats do, however, include large amounts of cheese, preserved meats and whatever else they feel like chucking out. This particular bar would have had something like 30 odd different dishes. I was starting to enjoy the country and I hadn't even met George Clooney (look up his adverts for Martini on YouTube if you are bored).

The 6th involved our second picnic of the trip. We bought tickets for cruising around the lake on boats. Ships. Whatever they are called. And we got to stop in at various places. So we stayed on board mostly and treated ourselves to a little picnic on the only island on the lake. Strangely no one else seemed interested in the same idea. It was certainly delightful to cruise sedately around without the tremors that come from bus travel. Gazing upon the opulent lifestyle of the rich and, quite frankly, wanting to keep themselves non-famous, was definitely a fine way to wind away the afternoon after a bottle of Chianti.

Bergamo

May 7th to 8th

Our destination is Padua for a major stop, but in stepping across the country, we decided on one final visit in Lombardia: Bergamo. This town used to be a major financial centre, and still is in many respects, and sprawls out from the old town. I bravely guarded the luggage while Hal sought out the tourist office. After traipsing to the centre of town and back she discovered that the Lonely Planet had lied and the tourist information was next to the train station, carefully signed so as to not attract attention. We procured slightly dodgey accommodation within trundling distance of the train station, made use of it's shared baths, and headed to the old town via the reticulated rail.

This was our first taste of the medieval hill town, with winding streets, small alleys, museums and cathedrals. It is a delightful place. We even found a wonderful, though slightly expensive, outdoor covered restaurant in the Slow Food style. Good wine, a half platter of wonderful cheese and a full platter of cold meats, including our first taste of lard. I'll leave Hal to talk about that more (she is rumouring a food page...). In a happy mood we returned to the hotel via a couple of bars, which included my first try of neat Campari (not bad...).

And thus Bergamo was our last taste of Lombardia. Not that we really had a clue when we were leaving one region to enter another, but it is a good way of breaking up some webpages.

Summary

Obviously what everyone wants at this point in time is a rating. So here are my purely scientifically validated and mathematically normalised ratings of each town: