Transcending Borders With Seeds in Our Hands

I got bored with Milan pretty quickly after seeing the Duomo, which was incredible, but that was pretty much the only sight I’ll remember fondly. I walked to La Scala, the opera house where Verdi and other major operatic composers premiered their works, was not impressive or as glitzy on the outside as I expected. It was quite plain and I almost didn’t even bother taking a photo of it. I continued up the street a ways to the main shopping area, supposedly the center of fashion, and was so disappointed by how boring the displays were and the streets were dingy and close together. I compared it to Rodeo Drive and considered the latter to be much, much more impressive. Other than that, I DID find a GROM Gelato right up the street from my hostel in Milan, which, if you’ve been looking at my pictures much, you will notice I am obsessed with. But you would be as obsessed if you could taste the stuff they scoop out. It is made from all organic ingredients and, having tried WAY too much gelato–I mean replacing whole meals with gelato–I can tell you that the organic ingredients and whatever else they put in make it the best. I tried quite a few of the flavors, even going for ones I normally steer away from like lemon and pistachio. The best ones however, are the ones that are chocolate-based, like the bacio (hazelnut and chocolate), Cioccolato Fondente (dark chocolate), and straciatella (vanilla gelato with streaks of chocolate fudge). Anyway, I’ll stop with the gelato because there is no sense going on and making you crave it so badly.
As I was saying, I got a little bored with Milan and so I decided to take a “little” daytrip up into Switzerland since it was so close and I figured I probably wouldn’t be close enough to go there in the future. I got up really early and 3 hours later I was in Lugano, a town in Italian Switzerland. I walked around the park which had beautiful landscaping and lake views. I found an ATM and took out some Swiss Francs which were at about the same exchange rate as the dollar. I only took out 100, thinking that would be plenty for the day. I continued walking around the lake and then after about two hours I hiked it all the way back to the train station, which conveniently (NOT) was located up on top of a hill that looks over the city. I went to the ticket machine and bought a half-price ticket because I had seen something on the rail website about getting a half-day pass and only paying 55CHF. I bought the ticket to Luzern and hopped on and began to enjoy the beautiful Alps and the little mountain towns nestled in the valleys. After about a half hour, the ticket checker came through and I handed him my ticket and he started saying something in German. I thought he was asking for ID or something, so I took out my passport and handed it to him. Then, seeing the ‘UNITED STATES OF AMERICA’, he said, “This is a half-price ticket…only for under 16.” I did not know what to do. I was like, “So do I pay the difference at the next train station?” He didn’t respond but typed on this little computer thing for what seemed like ages. Then he produced a figure, 60 francs, and I reached in my pocket and had only 40 francs left and a bunch of euros. So I paid in a mixture of the two, thereby screwing me over immensely with the exchange rate, and he printed off a ticket right there and stapled it to mine. He simply said, “Okay, there you go,” and moved on. In the end, I felt that I could have done without the sidetrip to Switzerland because it was SO ridiculously expensive. The train ticket alone ended up being almost 90 dollars…and that’s just to the middle of the country! I got back into Italy at 10:30 that night. I went to bed and early the next morning I headed up to Lake Como.

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