Day 1 - Travelling
The big first leg
I left Canberra late (18:45) on 28 September and eventually arrived in Santa Margherita Ligure (from now on SML) late (20:30) on 29 September. Something like 30 hours ‘on the move’.
Like all international travel these days, the experience was mostly anodyne. Emirates are an excellent carrier, so my journey was comfortable. Interestingly, both major international legs were less-than-full. I had three seats to myself for the Melbourne to Dubai leg (15+ hours), and an empty seat next to me for Dubai to Milan (6+ hours). That meant that I got to ‘lie down’ to ‘sleep’ for nearly eight hours on the way to Dubai.
One interesting thing that I saw as we came in to land in Dubai was the desert camps of the Emirati, and then later a suburb of their ‘city’ homes. I’d seen similar buildings when visiting Oman and it always intrigues me. The camps are very simple, or spartan but are important family places. The city homes are comfortable and fairly large. There appears to me to be very consistent architectural approach to these houses. I photographed them from the plane – not well, as it turns out.
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When I arrived in Dubai, it was 6:30am local time and 30C. The air-conditioning in the bus that transferred us from the plane to the terminal building (a drive of about 10 mins) was so cold, the grab rails were freezing to the touch.
I did some work online while laying over in Dubai, getting a couple of key coordinating tasks complete in time.
The next leg (Dubai to Milan) was on an A380-800. They are seriously big aircraft! I realise that it is a naive, cliche statement, but the fact that they can get this enormous craft into the air and keep it there for hours is really a modern miracle.
Arrived in Milan after a day’s work on personal projects on the computer and watching the inflight version of “The Accountant 2”. My first challenge was to buy a SIM to stay connect while in Europe. That turned out to be ludicrously easy. I have a SIM that will give me 200Gb throughout Europe for 60 days. Let’s see if that enough!
My next challenge awaited me: negotiating the purchase of train tickets to get from Milan Malpensa airport to SML, ideally using one of the two rail passes that I’ve acquired. It turns out, the Malpensa Express to Milan Central is not on the pass network, so I bought a ticket, waited for ~15 minutes and got the train into Milan without incident. Unsurprisingly, the service staff at the airport and railway were able to manage in English just fine.
Milan Central is a pretty impressive building! And also a bit bewildering for a noobie after 24 hours of constant travelling. After failing to get some help from a couple of security personnel about where to find the main ticket office (I was not going to attempt the electronic ticket machines on my first go!) because of language, I managed to find it just by wandering around and using some common sense.
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Again, the staff here were very helpful (in English) and I managed to buy a first class train seat on my Italian Rail Pass to take me directly to SML on the InterCity train, which ended up doing some pretty impressive speeds on long sections. I’m slowing learning the ropes with the rail pass app, too. It seems to make a lot of assumptions about the user knowing what they want to do and how to do it. And then asks alarming questions like “Are you sure you want to activate your travel pass now?”, implying that now is not the time. I am harbouring some doubts that I’ve activated the correct rail pass (it has everything to do with number of trips within a defined period) but I’ve resigned myself to just getting another one if I need it.
Arriving at SML station, I had what I thought was a 15 min walk ahead of me. I was a little alarmed when I checked on Google Maps and it suggested that I was much further down the coast that I thought and had a 53 min drive ahead of me! I trusted my senses, reasserted my dominance over Google Maps and it decided I was where I thought I was, so I set off with more confidence. The walk turned out to be easy enough, largely downhill, walking on the smooth street surfaces with my trolley suitcases in the absence of almost any traffic (at 8 pm on a Monday night).
I found the apartment building just fine, or thought I did. It turns out, the Google Maps idea of which building I was headed for was confused by the fact that the actual place I needed was up a driveway behind the building that Google pointed to. In fairness to Google, the building it pointed to was labelled 82A, 82B, 82C and 82D. I needed the building just labelled 82. Anyway, I found it, the keys worked and I arrived at the beautiful apartment that Paola and Silvia have allowed me to stay at.
On arrival, I sorted out where everything was, but couldn’t find how to turn the water on. Eventually, having looked pretty extensively, I decided that it was going to be tomorrow’s problem and went to bed.
Congrats at finding the building! I should have explained how in small cities in particular apartment blocks are often off the main road, in this case Corso Matteotti :)
ReplyDeleteIt was all a bit confusing, but mostly because I was tired, and it was dark. It turns out that I was lucky because the door to the foyer opened when I pushed it and I didn't discover till yesterday that the key I had for that door didn't work! That's been fixed now.
DeleteWHOOP! Step 1 successfully navigated. Let the indulgence begin! (I was also quite impressed with the Milan station, but found it a bit incongruous the commercial tatty shops in such a grand space!)
ReplyDeleteYes, I thought that too. I'm sure the thousands of commuters who use the place daily don't worry about that though.
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