I've been a wild rover for manys a year....

This is a true story. None of the details have been changed to protect the innocent.

So a while ago, Arseniy and I left for a short jaunt up to Ireland. Why Ireland? (Why not Ireland, don’t question me) Actually we chose the Emerald Isle because

A) it seemed like a pretty sweet place to spend a three day weekend
B) It would give us a short break from Italian (or so we thought)
C) Beer

Okay to be fair, beer wasn’t that big of part of that decision. But the other two reasons are valid. At that point we didn’t mind the idea of being able to go up to a shop keep and be able to explain in no uncertain terms exactly what needed to go down. So we bought our tickets, made reservations at a hostel and packed or bags to head up north. Luckily we thought about the fact that we were going north (we were to later find that Ireland even at the end of March is cold enough to freeze the balls off a brass monkey (Not as dirty as it sounds, I’ll explain later if I have to)).

Since our flight was leaving at 9:30 p.m. on Ryanair, that meant we needed to be at the Bergamo airport by around 7:30 or so (Ryanair only flies into Milan at Bergamo). Not all that bad right? Wrong. Bergamo is about an hour bus ride out of Milan…a 8.70 euro ride no less. Cripes. So that meant we needed to leave Stazione Centrale at about 6:30, which meant that we needed to leave the flat around 5:45. Ugh, this was starting to look like an ordeal. Our biggest fear was that Dublin would become Venice, and no one should have to go through Venice twice (see earlier post Masks and Oranges, I can’t exactly remember the title it something like that). To our complete surprise, everything went as well as could be expected. Our bus left Centrale right around 6:30, we rolled into Bergamo at 7:30, checked in, had a coffee, waited for a while, and the flight left on time (HA HA!! Take that Murphy, you jackass!).

A quick word about Ryanair. I don’t know how many of you, my readers (of which there are now undoubtedly fewer due to my negligence. I beg your individual pardons), have ridden Ryanair but there are some really cool things and some slightly less cool things about it. Let me detail it in two lists:

Cool things: Cheap as crap (providing you book well ahead of time), over 90% of their flights arrive on time (this is tied to an uncool thing though…wait for it…), and ummm…. that’s about it.

Uncool things: The inside of the plane is unbelievably yellow (It’s like drowning in Mountain Dew inside a rubber duck), the seats don’t recline at all (forcing all manner of inventive, but equally uncomfortable sleeping positions), I have to go to Bergamo to fly with them, and when you arrive on schedule you have to listen to recorded fanfare and an Irish dude telling you that over 90% of Ryanair flights arrive on time.

Luckily for Ryanair, the first cool thing (hella cheap), is sweet enough to make up for all of the uncool things. Okay, back to the trip.

We rolled into Dublin at about 10:30 local time, and stepped onto the tarmac is a whirl of a category 4 hurricane and freezing rain. Ok not really, but it WAS really cold, windy, and rainy. So far Ireland had not disappointed my expectations. After getting through customs (by the way, the Irish are waaaaay more uptight about who is coming into their country than the Italians), we eventually found the bus that would take us in the general direction of our hostel. We arrived on O’Connell street, and in short order found our hostel, Marlborough Hostel. Typically this is where you would expect me to go on in great detail and describe how awesome our hostel was and all the sweet people we met there. Well, I’m not. It was a pretty cool place, but not epic or anything. Way too many pink, electric blue, and lime green rooms for my taste (And it smelled like….chicken bullion. Everywhere all the time). Here is a picture of our room which we shared with 4 girls, all from the states.


Never really saw them. On the plus side, we asked the guy at the desk, Steven, where would be a good place to grab a beer. He directed us to this pub where we stood at the bar and ordered our first pint of black. Excellent. There was also some guy playing Irish drinking songs, a few of which I knew. (It was awesome. I was in Ireland, drinking some of the black, and singing The Wild Rover. Ranks pretty high up there in travelling experiences). After our pint we headed back towards the hostel to grab some shuteye so that we could jump up early the next day and start exploring.

Which didn’t happen, we actually got up at about 10 but in all fairness we were out the door in 10-15 min. We quickly decided that the best way to prepare ourselves for the cold, blustery day was to have a pint of Guinness. Just kidding, we actually had an Irish breakfast and tea. It was my first face to face encounter with black pudding (yes I knew what it was before I ate it), which was actually pretty dang tasty, and I have no trouble saying that I would eat it again.

(Oh snap, I have to run downtown for photography class, I’ll be back)

(Ok, I’m back. Also went and bought some killer provolone)

Ok, after our hearty breakfast, we wandered around for just a short while before heading out for our main goal of the day…the Guinness brewery. (According to some of the girls from our room, it was waaaay to far to walk. It took like 20 min. Pansies.) It was a nice enough walk, taking us down the Liffey (seen here)



and letting us take in a few sights. Then we started up the hill and started smelling some of the fermentation gas being released from the vats. Ahh…fart smell… Visitors aren’t actually allowed to go inside the actual factory anymore, I guess to keep people from accidentally dropping mud from shoes, hair, or spitting into the tuns. But they have a really cool set up, where you get to walk around and see all the various ingredients and read about the history and stuff. There is a little place where you get to watch some really pretentious guy on TV and tell you how to properly taste Guinness and so you get to have a quarter pint. Then you can continue going up in the museum, checking things out and such until you get to the top where you can enjoy a complimentary pint while overlooking the whole of Dublin.



Excellent. I can also say that Guinness has truly never tasted as good as it did there in the factory. Whether or not there was an actual difference or if it was all in my head I’ll leave up for you to decide.

After the factory, Arseniy and I just kind of nonchalantly wandered around the city seeing some nice churches and enjoying some temporary (and relative) warmth during the afternoon. We found out several things about Dublin, it’s a very nice city: clean, open, friendly.


My kind of place.

The second thing is that Dublin is in fact just an extension of Italy. (Seriously I heard more Italian in Dublin than I heard English. Everywhere I looked there was a pizza place…..*sigh* so much for having a break from Italy) That night we set out to fufill our goal of eating some fish and chips while in Ireland (for those of you that know my fear of fried fish, I figured I should try to overcome it for this). We eventually found this place that both had really good fish and chips, but had also apparently been visited by everyone famous and their mother. You can see both the meal (I went with cod), and the list of people here) Afterwards we went to a small pub and I crossed another Irish beer (Smithwicks, a brown ale and really good) off my list, and I then found out that good cider is also “proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy”, to erroneously use Franklin’s words. Afterwards we went home for a good night’s sleep in preparation for the next day’s plans, which was to simply make it to the coast. But as it turned out the night wasn’t nearly over yet…

At some point, Arseniy asked if I wanted to go on a walk out into Dublin. Thought tired I was game enough (don’t let it be said that Sam Howell is anything but game for walks). So we left the hostel and decided to go in a direction we hadn’t explored before. After a walking for a while, through the ghetto and under some bridges, we found ourselves in only what could be described as the nitty gritty of Dublin. Nothing to really worry about, I mean we’re too wary enough dudes so we weren’t too worried. That’s when things started to get weird. As we were walking down the street in an aging neighborhood, I saw the king of spades laying on the pavement.



Summoning the artist in me, I tried to make the most of it and took a few pictures (I mean coming across a random card in the street is pretty crazy, and I was on the lookout for pictures for my photography class). After snapping a few pics, I reached down and picked up the card. Immediately things started getting weird. About thirty seconds after I picked up the card a woman had appeared on the previously deserted street. She looked to be around 40, with kind of a vacant look on her face and kind of tawny, mousy hair.

“Please don’t gossip.” She implored softly.

This isn’t what we had expected at all. From our experiences in Italy, if anyone actually approaches you at night, they probably want a cigarette. And we hadn’t even been talking so this gossip comment threw us for a loop.

“Excuse me? Asked Arseniy

“Don’t gossip. I’ve been fighting gossip for ten years and I’m afraid it’s going to kill me.”

“Um...thanks.” I muttered, and we strode on. Looking back over my shoulder, I saw her looking at us and shaking off some chills turned back and continued walking. Not a minute later some large drunken man stumbled past, only pausing to blare a horn in our faces. Not inherently weird or creepy in and of itself, but in combination with the lady we were starting to get pretty uneasy. After the horn man, things were relatively calm for a while, and we were probably about ¾ of a mile away from where I had picked up the king of spades. And there, scattered across the road, we saw the rest of the same deck of cards. Though all rationale and logic says none of this had anything to do with the king, I threw it down among the others and we hastened on our way. We decided that the best course of action was to stop into a nice crowded pub for a steadying pint. We found solace in a cool drink and rowdy company. But upon our exit, Dublin seemed determined to have one more go at us, and there staring at us was this creepy old man doll, blankly staring with a slight smirk and holding a bottle. We made it back to the hostel intact but in silence. We settled in for some sleep, not really talking about the odd events during the witching hours of Dublin.

Our original plan was to just spend the next day out on the coast. But we actually ended up going to the Bodies exhibit first. Yes, I did actually go, believe it or not. I know many of you are shocked, and there were no dire consequences, though I was truthfully rather unsettled by it all. Call me a pansy if you wish, but that’s the truth of it.

After the exhibit we just kind of wandered in the direction of Dublin port, and after a good hour and a half of wandering finally came upon the sea. I actually had the thought to take a video, so here it is. I had been taking some pictures so I forgot I had the zoom on so you all can enjoy a close up of my face.



We then just kind of sauntered around the coast for a while, finally coming to the longest damn breakwater I’ve ever seen.



It was literally 2 km long and it felt like an eternity to walk to the end of it, but walk to the end we did. All the way to the lighthouse. You can see me extending my empire over the Land of the Celts and Picts.



We tried to hang out for a while at the end of the breakwater, but we were in imminent danger of being blown off into the waters. The trek back was waaay harder, seeing as how it was around 4-5 in the evening and we had failed to eat anything that day. So we started slogging our way back…it started to sprinkle at a few points, but our vehement curses at Murphy and Finagle were apparently of some use, because we were never actually subjected to full out rain. By the time we staggered back into actual Dublin, we were absolutely wiped out. We decided that the only cure was to take the money saved by not eating the first to meals and apply them to dinner, so we had some really good Chinese food in a restaurant around the corner from our hostel. It was so wonderful to once again taste the flavors of the east upon my tongue, after such a long dry spell (2 months. Don’t laugh, it’s a hard two months) After dinner, we did little more asides from go buy some cider to enjoy in the comfort of the hostel’s courtyard (comfort=really damn cold). And later, in the wee hours of the morning we set off back to Italia.

The Visitors

So, the fact of the matter is that I am currently about two/two and a half weeks behind blogging schedule. I'm going to do my best but I've determined the only way to catch up and still do all my homework is to give some portion of the Milan experience the short shrift and I'm afraid it is going to have to be this part, no offense to my awesome visitors who I was thrilled to see. It's just the only way I can make up in some part for my own negligence so I apologize to you, dear readers for being a bum. But on to the story...

So three weekends ago Matt Warner rolled into town on his way to Avignon to visit our friend Sarah Idrissi. We had been facebook messaging back and forth several weeks prior trying to figure out which airport he needed to fly into and what time and all that little nitpicky but really kind of important stuff that you have to straighten out when flying, especially into a foreign country. (Early on in the negotiations, I made it clear to Matt that he had a place to stay only if he met my demands:

1)Giant bag of peanut M&M's (Really, really expensive over here. I can drop 2 euro on something only slightly bigger than a fun size bag. Cripes!)

2)A jar of salsa (B/c I hate eating eggs without salsa, and they're one of the cheaper ways to get protein over here and so I've been forced to eat a lot of non-salsa-ed eggs. sad face)

Luckily he quickly gave in to my demands as he realized had no hope of winning the negotiations. So finally I told him that I would meet him on Friday at Cadorna station next to the giant sewing needle (Yeah, for some reason Milan has this giant public sculpture of a needle. No idea where it comes from. Check it out)after my class got out at 12. As Murphy would have it, I got out 15 minutes late that Friday. "Cripes," I thought "Matt's going to have gotten impatient and wandered off and I'm going to have to go around asking people if they've seen an American wandering around with several suitcases and a large black fro." Luckily when I turned the corner and the needle came into view, Matt was standing beneath it thereby saving me lots of awkward Italian conversations (Also I don't know if there is a different word for afro). I was really glad to see someone from back home, though it was incredibly weird at the same time. As I would find out later, walking around with someone from home makes my brain feel like everything should be in English, but it was of course all in Italian so my head was kind of muddled for a while. Anyways, moving on with the story, I took Matt back to our place so he could dump off his stuff before taking him on the Milan-in-a-day tour.

I took him up around the Piazza del Duomo where we went inside the Duomo (speaking of which, I don't think I've given you all a picture of the Duomo yet. I'm not sure how I haven't done that yet. Huh, well here you go. This isn't taken when Matt and I were there, it's from a night long ago at about 5 in the morning) and afterwards grabbed some Gelato from one of my favorite places, Grom. After our finishing our gelati, we decided to drop 5 euro to take he stairs up onto the roof of the Duomo. This might seem steep, but upon arriving on the roof it was clear that it had been money well spent. You could see all of Milan and the Alps off in the distance. We spent a probably an hour and a half up there, just enjoying the view and chatting about stuff home. I also took a video, which you may find below for your viewing pleasure : (Or not. I can't really guarantee that you'll enjoy it, but at least I tried)


While on the roof we ran into my friend Johannes and his girlfriend. He said they might be trying to set up an aperitivo later that day and we were welcome to come along if we liked. Since aperitivo is an important part of the Milan experience, I told him that would be cool and to just let us know where and when once they had it figured out. As it turned out we never ended meeting up with them and instead just took some beer out near the columns with my flatmate Luka. Good enough for a slow night out on the town. We took the rest of Matt's visit kind of slow, with the exception of an aperitivo at Costanza's house which was pretty cool. Matt got to meet some of my Italian and international friends and at the very least he seemed to enjoy himself. And a day later he was off to Avignon, where he would spend the week and come back and spend a night back here in Milan before heading back to the states.

My weeks was then spent with general schoolwork, I had a critique in photography to prepare for, so I had plenty of things to keep me occupied before the arrival of my second set of guests. Jenna Thorp and Brett Jacobsen had chosen to spend their spring break bumming around Firenze, and had asked if they could swing through Milan on their way back. (I was really happy to have the chance to see two groups of people. I was entirely ready to go and entire semester without seeing anything more than a skype image of anyone, so this was an awesome surprise. Without thinking about the fact they would be coming in on a train from Firenze and not the airport, I told them to meet me by the needle, since that had worked out so well last time.

So when I got out of class Friday, I had a text message from Brett telling me they were up at Stazione Centrale (Of course they were Sam you doofus, real trains go into Centrale not Cadorna). After mentally beating my head against a wall for being stupid, I told them that I would meet them up there so just hang tight. Twenty minutes later, I was wandering around trying to find them in the cavernous building that is Centrale. Finally I found them out by the "center" of Milan (Here's the deal. Mussolini was all about Centrale reflecting the glory of the Fascist regime. It is a very austere, imperial, and beautiful building. Outside you can see the circle which is (According to Mussolini) the exact center of Milan. However if you look at a map, I have no idea how he came to that conclusion. Maybe if you stripped away all the growth since the end of WWII...anyways that is where they were). After I found them I immediately went about removing any sense of competency by not paying attention and getting on the metro that continues north instead of getting on the southbound metro which is the one we needed. (Good job there smart guy, way to demonstrate some competency there :/ But nevetherless despite of my stupidity I did manage to find my way home so that they could deposit their bags and...yes thats right...go to the Duomo.

Here I could type another paragraph about what we did, or I could refer you to three paragraphs previously. We went inside, ate gelato, went on the roof. It was a lot of fun though, and in contrast to when Matt was there we got to art nerd out on the Duomo itself and we did spend a good deal more time there than when I was there with Matt. Then we started the walk home and I took them through the Castello and around to Cadorna where they could see the meeting place that never happened. As we walked home, I threw out a few ideas as to what the next days activities could include. Museums, walking around, shopping (I mean if that's what you're into), but then a bolt of genius darted through my mind. "Hey," I said "what do you think about going to Como tomorrow?" That was a big hit so we decided that the next day I would return to and they would explore... Como.

The next day we were a little late getting out the door...again. (We just can't be punctual when trying to get to Como apparently) but eventually we got to Cadorna and jumped on a train. As it pulled out of the station, I could feel the relaxing influence of Como seeping into my body, and I knew we were in for a good day.

*Here the author needed to go buy some food for dinner. This part of the blog could be omitted but this is real in-the-now information from Milan. Just letting you know.*

So okay, now I that have some sauce simmering so on with the story. Arseniy and I advocated that going a different direction than last time. (We went right last time, so we thought going left might be exciting) Once again we wandered for about a kilometer or so before we found a nice park area to chill around in. We sat and enjoyed the sun, talking and watching a couple swans and pondering why they are one water fowl that has somehow escaped making its way onto humankind's tables. It was another gorgeous day, and no surprise that we all napped at some point. Later in the afternoon we ventured back into the actual city of Como, which was also really quite calm. It actually felt like Venice to tell the truth, which was kind of weird (I started to ave this paranoia that I would soon be forced to freeze in a train station somewhere). But soon enough we decided that it was about time to head back, b/c we were supposed to meet Costanza around 8 for aperitivo in the vicinity of the columns.

I'd tell you some entertaining stories about the train ride back, but truth is we were all asleep until we rolled into Cadorna station at about 6. We decided to run home before meeting up for aperitivo. Aperitivo was good, filled with tasty food and chilly weather. Afterwards we spent the rest of our night hanging out at this streetfront bar called the Paladin. By the time we left, it was waaay past the time when the trams stop running so I got to show Jenna and Brett one of the more frequent parts of life in Milan, walking an hour through the deserted streets all the way home. By the time we got home it was probably 3 or so in the morning, and I don't know about the two girls, but I was wiped out. Unfortunately they needed to get into Cadorna to catch the train to the airport by 5, and the metro doesn't open until 6. So I had to exercise my extremely tired mind and call a taxi to the house, which luckily wasn't all that difficult. (To be honest, I was insufferably pleased with myself at how smoothly it had gone) and they were off into the Italian night just a short while later.

Well, I finally managed to document my visitors. Hopefully sometime tomorrow I'll have finished my post about me trip to Ireland. Until then, peace!