Milan and stuff

So Milan has been a bit of an experience. It's certainly not a Florence or a Rome, or it hasn't been presented to us in the same way: exploring the history of the city as a primary point of contact. Milan was probably our first fully modern experience of a city in Italy. Starting with a guided tour through a few of the main streets on Wednesday hitting the Duomo and the major galleria before turning to a hole-in-the wall sandwich shop and then headed back to the hotel for lectures in the afternoon. I never recall the lectures as well as I do the cities or the experiences...which is probably a bad thing. Anyway that was the day of our second set of lectures which went alright, just far too many in a row. This was done to open up Friday which I'm eternally grateful for now, just not at the time. The night was capped by going back into Milan for a group dinner in a small family restaurant that we really dominated the top floor of with our antics. A wonderful, if busy, day making the food taste probably three times as good.

Thursday began with two amazing marketing talks: the first focused on coffee and the second a more broad discussion on Italy design tactics. They were probably my favorite lectures of the trip. Focusing in on what coffee companies are doing to expand the market and push to the far east where coffee is seen as a sign of wealth and when a nation like China suddenly develops a middle class...well the possibilities are endless. What really surprised me was the relationship to increase in income and increase in coffee consumption being almost 1:1! To cap off the morning Professor Rappaport talked about wave harmonics and then we were let loose upon the city. William, Grace, and I along with a few others decided to do the typical thing one does in Milan and go shopping. Some for a blazer, others for a purse, but I really had no intentions of buying anything. Of course that's before I found a tropical bucket hat and an English soccer jersey, so I guess Milan caught another in its web of fashion. After a long day on our feet we headed home to relax before dinner and take care of things like laundry. Grace got me hooked on Smallville which took up an embarrassing amount of time last night, only justifiable because we didn't have class today…

...So I took full advantage of that and did not arise until around 10:30. Grace, John, and I started what remained of the day with some pool before heading into Milan searching for this aquarium we'd discovered online, the third oldest in Europe! We took a relatively long way exploring the parts of the city outside the general scope of fashion and dense cobble-stone streets. The aquarium was relatively small but well worth the small entry fee. It had this amazing outdoors turtle exhibit where we spent far too much time watching as the turtles tried to climb on a sunken log. After that we strolled through the nearby park and got some, wait for it, Italian Ice which we consumed at the base of a statue of Napoleon III. At this point we were all a little tired but decided to check out the rest of the park and see what we could. The end result being that we found the hokiest American restaurant known to man and couldn't resist the call of burgers and fries. Horrendous food. Absolutely horrendous. In fact I'm starting to feel a little funny….