orvieto a tutti: milan and verona

we had our second main trip this semester to northern italy. the class trip started on monday but i decided to leave early to visit my cousin alberta in milan. we had an extra class with marco friday morning and i left right after to catch the five hour and 30 min train ride to milan, which wasn't bad until about 15 min outside of milan. the train in front of me broke down and we sat on the tracks and got to milan an hour and a half late. my other cousin alessandro met me at the central station in milan and drove me to alberta's house. by this time it was already late so we just relaxed and watched some italian tv, which is extremely different than american tv. saturday morning was carnivale in milan. carnivale is about a month long celebration and culminates on fat tuesday. the sunday before and fat tuesday itself is a pretty big holiday. milan's celebration of carnivale is a week after the rest of italy. so on saturday morning we took giovanni ( alberta's four year old son ) out to a carnivale parade. all of the kids dress up similar to our halloween costumes and giovanni went as a carabinieri ( italian police man ). all of the kids (and some of the adults) at the parade throw handfuls of confetti spray silly string everywhere. after a few confetti showers we watched the canrivale parade go through. after this alessandro and i left to go see the city center of milan. the piazza infront of the duomo was carpeted with confetti and empty silly string bottles. the duomo in milan is one of the largest churches in the world and cant seat over 40,000 people inside. we then walked through the gallery and walked through the main areas of milan. we got back late and went to bed right after. sunday morning alessandro had to catch a plane back to gioiosa in southern italy. sunday the weather was overcast so we hung around indoors until late afternoon when we drove up to lake como for dinner with some of alberta's friends and family. alot of the people we were eating with spoke english so i was able to communicate pretty well. we had amazing pizza for dinner. everyone ordered their own and when they came out they were each about 8 inches wide and a little over 2 feet long and were fantastic. after pizza we had some desert and left to head back. monday morning it was time for me to leave and meet up with my class that was on their way to verona. on the way to the train we dropped giovanni off at his preschool.

i ended up getting to verona about an hour before my class so i waited for them on the platform. when they got there we all checked into our hotel and left to explore. verona is the city where the story of romeo and juliet took place so we stopped by the famous juliet's balcony. we had a group dinner that night which wasn't the greatest and most of us went searching for more food right after leaving the resturant. verona is also one of the only other cities in italy that has an existing coloseum. unlike the coloseum in rome this one is still in relatively good condition and is still used for concerts and other large events. we went into the coloseum as a class and after a short walking tour we were released again to explore. almost all of us climbed the hill to get an amazing panorama of verona. the next day we got up and left for venice...