We were starving when our train arrived in Milan. We were nearly out of cash and nowhere took credit cards! What major city doesn't take cards? So we ate at Burger King... which, I'm sorry to say, totally hit the spot. :)
The central train station is gorgeous and massive. The cathedral is pretty cool, especially the interior stained glass, but we were too tired to care much about it. Todd humored me with a brief window shopping excursion, (I got inordinately excited about the GAP) then we decided to look for a grocery store. We wandered around Milan in the dark for more than an hour, passing by so many grocery store icons on our Google Map that didn't turn out to be grocery stores at all. And in an hour of wandering, we never found one! (We live within 10 minutes' walk of at least 5 in Copenhagen.) We ended up eating dinner at the hotel and left the next morning. And that's the end of Milan.
We planned to spend our last day in Lake Como--another place I found on my high school calendar, probably most known these days for being home to George Clooney. I wanted to visit the Hotel Villa d'Este... but that's all I had on my list. Not wanting to be bored, we decided to go out to Venice instead.
Most people told us Venice wasn't a must-see. We debated going and ended up spending kind of a lot of money for last-minute tickets. But it was totally worth it!
You walk out of the Santa Lucia train station and instead of being on a main road, you're on a main canal. We took the public water taxi up the Grand Canal accompanied by a Rick Steves audio tour. It was just incredible--everything Disney tries to achieve in its theme parks, but real.
The vaporetto tour ended at St. Mark's Square, which was nice but very crowded and commercial, and mostly under construction. Ignore Diane Kruger's giant face (one of many huge ads covering the old buildings) and just listen to one of the cafe orchestras. So charming.
After eating lunch at a pretty bad/expensive/touristy restaurant, Todd wanted to try an authentic chocolate shop. We wandered around looking for it and didn't mind one bit getting lost on the side streets and canals with their picturesque little bridges! The shop, Vizio Virtรน, seemed authentic (no tourists, hard to find) and the chocolate was unique and delicious. And of course we also got gelato.
Usually I'm the one overcome by European charm. But as we were going down the Grand Canal, Todd said to me: "Sorry, honey... I think I'm in love with Venice!" Me, too.
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