This is a continuation of the last post, “On Our Way to Italy”
Once we were successfully through immigration, we headed to the baggage claim area, and as we expected, our bags were already out and circling the carousel because of the delays at Immigration. We were pretty certain our bags had arrived with us on the flight, Delta has a baggage tracking system on their phone app, so we already knew our luggage had been loaded at JFK, at least the App had indicated as much.
With luggage in hand, we headed out to find a shuttle bus to the Milano Centrale Train Station. It was quite a walk inside the terminal before we found the location for the shuttle buses. It was a little confusing, there are three shuttle bus companies that depart at different times. We were trying to find the one leaving the soonest, but that became too difficult, so we just boarded the one that was easiest to get to. We waited about 10 minutes and we were on our way into Milan.
The ride to the Milano Centrale Station was scheduled to be about an hour long, but we ran into a traffic jam caused by an accident. It was in the worst spot possible, where several lanes merged into two lanes, and that really caused a back-up. We were about 20 minutes late arriving at the station. Next on our plan was to head inside the station to find the Vodafone Cell Phone Store and purchase Italian Vodafone SIM cards for our cell phones.
That process was easier than we anticipated, but a little more expensive than we had thought it would be. Vodafone has a special plan for visitors, but we were surprised at the final price, most likely due to the fact we were getting them at the train station instead of a regular Vodafone city store, and paying a “convenience fee”. We decided we were too tired to try and figure out if we should try elsewhere, so we opted to go ahead with the purchase. We think at worst case, it was in total about Euro 20.00 more than we had expected. The final cost was Euro 100.00 for the two SIM cards and phone plan which gives us each 500 minutes for calls to the USA and Italy, and 35 GB of Data. It is a monthly plan, so we will have to check to make sure if we need cancel the plan when we get home using the online web page for Vodafone.
We headed out of the station, and after having a little trouble getting our bearings, we finally figured out the correct side of the station to exit to walk to our hotel. For some reason, our offline Google Maps were not functioning correctly at first, but once the GPS on our phones figured out where we were, we could then use the map to determined the direction to the hotel. We still made a couple of wrong turns, but eventually got there. Being really tired from the long flight does not help when having to concentrate and make navigation decisions in an unfamiliar city.
The hotel was nice inside, and the staff was very friendly. They gave us a better room than we had reserved, probably because we were only there for one night, and it had not been booked. The room had a kitchen, and a really nice outside rooftop terrace, with room for two tables and eight chairs, plus a lounge chair. It was nice that we could check in early since it was only about 12:30 PM, and normal check-in time is at 2:00 PM. We had not been looking forward to having to store our bags and then venture out to see some sights had the room not been available until 2:00 PM.
We decided to take showers and hoped that would help refresh us a little after the long travel day. It really worked, we felt much better afterward, especially with some fresh undergarments! We opted to keep wearing our other clothes since it was quite warm today, and we knew we would be sweating more while we were out seeing sights. No need to get two sets of clothing dirty before we were even one day into the trip!
We headed back to the train station to get some assistance in blocking unwanted ad messages on our now activated Vodafone SIM cards. This had been recommended from doing our research online, but we needed the phones to be activated beforehand, which takes about an hour after the SIM card purchase. The salesperson had said he would help us to do the ad blocking since it required calling into an Italian speaking help menu. It took a little while, a different sales person that was there to help us was on hold for a bit before she was able to get the services blocked. With that accomplished, we headed to a train ticket machine to purchase our Regional Train tickets for tomorrow’s journey to Varenna on Lake Como, our second stop for the trip.
We then opted for a sandwich at a deli in the train station, it may have not been the best food, but it was just easier than finding something outside the station. After getting our nourishment, we headed downstairs to the underground Metro Station for the ride out to the Milan Cathedral, or Duomo
We wanted to purchase two 24 hour Metro Passes, but we could not find them on the ticket machine menu, so we opted for four, single ride tickets. The purchase went through, but only one ticket was printed, and then three additional receipt looking papers came out. We were not sure what had happened, but it looked like the transaction did not get completed, and only one ticket was actually issued. We tried to ask one of the ticket information staff in the Metro Station, but he did not speak any English, and directed us to the main help desk, which was packed with people waiting in line to be assisted.
We opted to try the ticket machine again, and try a couple of different selections, and we finally found menu with the daily pass, so we purchased two of those, and all went well this time with the transaction, and the passes were printed out without issue.
We finally headed off on the M1 Metro to the Duomo, and the exit for the metro station where we got off put us directly in front of the Cathedral.
We visited the Milan Duomo, the largest Cathedral in Milan, located on the main Piazza, or square. Entrance to the Cathedral and access to the rooftop required tickets, so we purchased them and then headed inside. It was really pretty inside the Cathedral, but they were doing some construction on the tall spire of the church, and there was some netting inside to catch any items that may fall from the construction.
We then climbed up a lot of steps to the roof of the Cathedral for some nice views of Milan. It was really interesting to walk around the roof line, but the highest, central part of the roof was closed for the construction.
It actually was a little hard to figure out how to go back down, there was a set of steps to go down back inside the cathedral, and since we had a ticket for entrance to the Cathedral, we could have, and should have gone down that way.
We finally figured out how to get down the same steps we had come up, but the scaffolding for the construction did not make it easy to figure that out.
Next, we visited the mall near the main Piazza, called the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, and then headed to the Castello Sforzesco nearby via the subway, just one stop away from the Cathedral. The Castello Sforzesco is a Castle that was built in the 15th century. After the castle visit, which was just really walking around the grounds in and around the fortification, we used Google Maps on the phone to locate a grocery store. There was one not far away, and in the general direction of our Metro Stop, so we headed there using Google Maps to direct us.
We purchased some wine, crackers, cheese and meats for a snack to have when we got back to the room.
We headed to the Metro Stop, and passed another stop for a different line on the way. We did not have a metro map, so we were not sure if this different line would take us where we needed to go, so we walked a few more blocks to the station we had originally gotten off at for the castle, and headed home. Once we saw the metro map inside the station, we realized that the other metro line came to this station and we could have transferred here and saved some walking, oh well.
We got back to our room at about 6:30 PM, and sat out on our terrace and had the wine and snacks that we had picked up at the grocery. Since we had bought quite a bit of cheese and various meats from the deli, we just ate those for dinner in our room. We were just too tired to go out to eat tonight after the long day and minimal sleep last night on the plane.
We headed to bed at about 10:30 PM, having accomplished our goal of staying up as late as we could to help us adjust to the new time. We were definitely looking forward to a good night’s sleep after the long travel day and sightseeing in Milan.