Milano

Today, we went to Milan to see some sites and shop. You have to be 18 to drive here, so Valentino, Tiffany, and I went by train and subway into the city. First, we stopped at an old castle, where the King and Queen of Milan used to live. It was old and looked very medieval. It was a huge building though, and when we exited the back, we saw people skiing. The funny thing about it, though, was that there was no snow in Milan, it was all fake. And the hill was fake too, it was set up kind of like those tall slides in the IX center that you use a potato sack to ride down, only they put fake snow on it and people skied down, I've never seen anything like it. Next, we started to shop. All down the streets to the town center (which is kind of like a Plaza Mayor from Spain) there are shops. Some of them were the same as American stores, others the same as Spain, and others were totally different. All the stores are having sales now for the holiday, so it was nice. The only problem was that since Milan is one of the fashion capitals, a lot of the stores sold designer things so they were even expensive on sale. We got to the town center and there was a huge white church in it. The building was really intricate and so was the inside. There were a lot of sculptures both in and outside the church. There was also a Christmas tree in the town center that was really tall, and it was surrounded by Tiffany blue boxes, but we did not see the Tiffany's store. To the right of the church were a bunch of giant pink plastic snails in front of an art museum. Valentino said that the snails were supposed to be a work of art. We found a European store that I really like, Zara, and spent most of our shopping time there. We went in their department store too which is called La Recinante. It had seven floors and all types of designers. We saw stores like Gucci, Prada, and Louis Vuitton. They also had a perfume called Aqua di Parma, and I explained to Valentino that Parma is my home town. He thinks that I am just from Akron because that was where my whole group went to school when we met in Spain. Valentino told us that eating can be expensive in Milan, so we went to a Burger King in the town center so it was packed. We waited in line for about 30 minutes to get our food. We also had to pay 10 cents for each ketchup packet! The cashier asked me how many packets I wanted, and I didn't know what to say. He kept repeating himself because he thought I didn't understand, but really I am just used to grabbing a handful and getting more if I needed it. We ended up getting 5 packets and it worked out well too. Luckily, we found a place to sit quickly. We went home by train again, and when we arrived at his house, a bunch of his grandparents and aunts and uncles were there, so we had to greet each one of them with kisses on their cheeks and awkwardly stand there because we don't speak Italian. We took a nap and now we are waiting for dinner in about 2 hours. After dinner, we are going out with Valentino and some of his friends. Tomorrow, he said he will show us around his town.