Milan

This is where our trip started. This is where all of the hours spent with books checked out from the library and countless hours with TripAdvisor.com culminated. The push through customs and the effort to find a bus to downtown Milan were pretty painless. The crazy hustle and bustle of the Milan train station were a sharp reminder that we were not in America anymore. My obsessive-compulsive controlling side was sent into flutter for a few minutes, but in the end we figured out what we needed to do.

We took the subway to the city center to see fourth largest cathedral in all of Europe. This was a priority. I had read a great deal about this. The Duomo. It took five hundred years to finish it. It was begun in the 1300's and finished in the 1800's. Its exterior is made of solid pink marble. We walked to the top and hung out on the roof. We didn't get any decent pictures of the inside, but the columns extending floor to ceiling were massive. As Greg put it, "This is the probably the most solid building I've ever seen."

We tooled around and relished the foreignness of what would be the trip of our lives. I did my spin on the bull's testes for good luck at the Galleria Vittorio Emmanuelle; we saw a monument to Leonardo DaVinci; and then we braved the African men that assaulted you as you entered or exited the subway with their wares. We went back to the train station. Milan was now checked off the itinerary. We had arrived!