Milan, Italy

Our flight from Barcelona to Milan had a couple of hiccups. We got into Milan awaiting luggage and the carousel which supposedly had our luggage was going around continuously with about 20 bags on it. We waited for a while on ours and several others were also waiting. After a while one of the others went off to make enquirers and we found that the had taken the wrong container off the Singapore plane and the bags going around were the priority bags that should have been going on to Singapore after Milan. They had to offload most of the plane we were told and our container of bags was first on instead of last. Two hours later our bags appeared and we were good to go. The reason later we were told for the delay was “Operational Reasons” a new phrase for fuck up.
The people on the plane must have been annoyed as they sat on the plane for two hours from what we understand then had a further 12 hr flight to Singapore on top of that.

Our taxi took us to our hotel, the Park Hyatt right beside the city centre, we could see the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II from our Hotel entrance and the Duomo just on the other side of it. This was the most expensive hotel on the trip by far even more than Singapore’s posh joint. Probably hard to compare as we did get an upgrade in Singapore from the room I had booked, but my preference was Singapore.

They staff were great and pampered us no end. On my wife’s birthday the following day there was a cake and bottle of bubbly waiting when we got back from sightseeing. They told me they would have delivered it on her birthday but we had inadvertently left the do not disturb light on the door so they did not come in.

We had room service breakfast two mornings in the Hotel. At £39 each morning, two was more than enough as two poached eggs and a couple of slices of toast are not worth that much. Almost NZD80 each day.

A lot of the main sights were within walking distance of the hotel although we did do a day train trip to Como which was a nice but the people were just there in the droves. It took us about 45 minutes to walk from the train down to the town centre and it was not far just slow walking by the time we went down through the rail tunnel, crossed the road and down the steps to the street. Como was just a tourist meca, all the main areas just had hoards of people everywhere, we walked back up past the cathedral to some of the less populated streets and found a nice cafe for lunch, then a stroll via the markets back to the station.

The following day we started by having breakfast at one of the California Cafe’s. This turned out to be a bit of a mistake as the service was terrible and the food was less than average. We then caught a tram to Naviglio, a small suburb of Milan. It has an area of canals and canal cruises, plus a lot of market stalls along the sides of one of the canals. We were originally looking for a leather belt but once again like Como the hoards of people changed our minds on walking far along canal. We took a different street and found an old Cafe run by an old Italian couple, it was more of a bakery and the cabinets were loaded with some fantastic sweet treats. From almost right outside the cafe we caught another tran and ended up at the CityLife mall which once again was a bit like the galleria Vittorio Emanuele mall beside our hotel full of high end shops.

We began our journey to Singapore from Milan by getting a 6.15am Taxi from the Hotel to the Central Railway station and had a bit of spare time to grab a coffee at the station. We left on the train out to the airport which takes just under an hour to Terminal 1. We had plenty of time to kill before our flight.s this one.