Milan

     Budapest was a lot of fun, and it was so nice to have Madeleine with us for that, but after she left (sad day!) we got ourselves ready for another adventure.

The Duomo in Milan!

Michael and Gianluca

     We spent New Years Eve relaxing at home, recovering from our trip and trying to figure out our next one.  Michael had a few friends from Milan who he'd gotten to know through Communion and Liberation in California where they were doing a semester of school, and he and I wanted to meet up with them on our trip to Italy. They were only available for a few days, so we had planned to leave on January first with the family, Dad driving our van. Unfortunately, as I described, the van wasn't quite feeling up to it that day... so we had to think of another plan, since our temporary rental car wasn't big enough for all of us. So Michael and I bought train tickets to Milan online (or thought we did...) and decided we'd plan the trip as we went! Saturday evening we booked some train tickets, went for a run and then took a train to Vienna to see the New Year's celebration there.
It was really crowded in Vienna, the streets and platz around Stephan's Dome were completely packed with people walking, buying and selling food, and singing and dancing (several live bands were playing here and there). It was really neat to see, though we were a little bummed to find out that Mass wasn't happening in St. Stephan's because of the loud festivities. So we walked about for a while until the hubbub became a little overwhelming, and then found a quiet Italian restaurant to have dinner.

The waiters spoke a combination of Italian, German and English, (so we did also) and although they didn't really listen to anything we said it turned out fine and we had a nice time. We trained back to Trumau around the time when the fireworks were beginning, and it was really an interesting experience. Apparently there aren't really any regulations for those fireworks at all. At least not any that anybody pays attention to. People were setting them off on every corner, and sometimes we'd see them fire horizontally over a lawn with people scattered about on it, instead of straight into the sky (where people don't tend to be.) I'm surprised none of them hit us since anybody walking outside seemed to be a likely target...

Every time the train stopped and the door opened, we'd jump because of the fireworks being set off just outside the door. It was neat training through the city at midnight though, we could watch them going off all over the city and get more than one view of them! Apparently the spectacle in Trumau was just as impressive if not more so, since it's such a small town. Mom said that the whole place seemed lit up as everybody lit their own. Michael and I got off our train in Traiskircken and walked about forty minutes along the train track to get to Trumau (we thought that would be better than having Dad wait up and pick us up, since we didn't know when we'd get back, and it completed the adventure anyway). The train track is not the most convenient place to walk, the rocks in between are huge and the tracks spaced just right to be annoying, but all the rocks were sparkling because of the ice so we enjoyed that and had a fun time.

     We arrived home safely, in time to pack, sleep for an hour or so, and then get up to catch a train! Unfortunately we found out that we had to pay double the amount we'd thought, and that would only take us to Venice, but we decided to do that and then get another train to Milan, or have Michael's friend Gianluca meet us there. The train ride was about seven hours, and the beginning was really beautiful. It was very early in the morning, and we were going through a bunch of snow covered villages in the mountains, which were a real treat to see. We got to Venice and saw a nice Venetian ticket machine before heading to Milan. In Milan we met Gianluca who drove us to his house, on the way filling Michael in on some Milanese cuss words and explaining which traffic rules one actually had to pay attention to, and which could be overlooked. ;)

After Mass when we arrived in Milan,
with Paul and Lucia!

     We got settled there and then went Mass at a nearby church that Gianluca often attends with his CL community in Milan. It was a very quick Sunday Mass, maybe forty minutes, yet recollected enough as far as Michael or I could tell, who were having difficulty staying awake from one minute to the next--Michael was doing the sleepy headbobble dance the entire time...  After Mass Gianluca told Michael that he'd like to introduce him to some friends of his who happened to be in Milan at the same time, and these friends turned out to be Paul and Lucia Dawson, CL friends of my family who had just been at Thomas and Becca's house a few weeks before, but were now visiting Lucia's family in Milan I think. Gianluca had no idea that I knew them already, and it also turns out that Michaels' cousin is dating Paul's sister, which just added another facet to the slightly weird happenstance of us all meeting on a random evening in Milan... God does strange and wonderful things! 

     After that we went to a pizza place to meet up with Michaels' other wonderful CL friend, Aldo. The four of us had a really lovely time, though we made it short so that we could get a loopy, sleepy Michael to bed. (I of course was completely awake and on top of things...)

     The next morning we were much more refreshed and ready to explore, so we had a nice breakfast with some pastries that Gianluca had bought and then we walked to the metro station and went to the Duomo, Milan's famous cathedral.

Waiting outside the Duomo.

Looking for the monkey?
Or planning for the statue of Gianluca...

     We met Aldo and his sister Elizabeth there and she showed us around and told us about it's history and a bunch of really neat facts about it. (She studies art history I think?) Apparently it took 500 years to build and was begun in 1386. It was was entirely funded from the people of Milan, and today you can still donate to have another spire erected. There are hundreds of statues on the spires and in niche's of the outside of the church ( I think she said more than a thousand?), many of which are saints, but also many people from Milan are represented there, since the cathedral was really made by the people of Milan and is a great treasure for them. (I believe Elizabeth said there was a statue of Mussolini up there somewhere, and Aldo says there's a monkey. I'm not really sure how that's supposed to help illustrate her point, but we talked quite a bit about that monkey- and about the statue of Gianluca that he's going to have erected up there one day.) We looked inside the cathedral for a while, and then climbed to the roof and looked out over Milan, it was a little foggy but still beautiful.

Inside the Duomo!

The crazy fancy shopping area...

We walked through a big, expensive, famous shopping/hotel area and looked at the thousand dollar, plastic looking purses and shoes and such sitting in their lonely glass cages, and felt grateful that we weren't staying in a hotel where we weren't allowed to touch anything or breathe, and then we went to find the historical castle of Milan.
On the way we stopped by a little coffee shop near the Duomo, and had some espresso. It was not a crowded touristy spot since it was sort of hidden out of the way, so it was a neat little experience. I guess in Italy people often just walk in, order a teeny tiny little cup of espresso, stand at the bar and chug it right there, put their euro coin on a plate and leave. So that's what we did. :)

On the roof of the Duomo!

     Then we walked to the castle, it was a fortress where the ruling family of Lombardi (? I think) lived way back, and it was at one end of the wall that surrounded the old city just like in Vienna. I think it used to be a palace, and then was a training ground for soldiers and a fortress used for various battles-- it was neat to see the big walls with little holes all over it for shooting out of, and the moats that surrounded the walls. Gianluca showed us on a map the places right outside the wall where people would be sent when they had the plague. Several years ago I read "The Betrothed," which takes place in Milan and near it, so it was really interesting to hear all those names again and actually see the sort of places described in the book. Gianluca referred to it a lot as he told us about the city, too.

A gate at the Lombardi Castle.

     After that we walked through the city some more to go see Gianluca's university (Catholic University of the Sacred Heart), and on the way he educated us a bit on types of motorcycles, and told us which ones were cool and which weren't. Apparently there's this rental system with cars there; you can search for certain rental cars with an app and find out where they're parked, when you find one you can drive it for a while, and then park it somewhere else for the next random person who needs it.
     Gianluca's uniersity was really quiet (since it was Christmas break) and really beautiful. There's a big CL community of students there, and Father Carron (the president of CL) teaches one of Gianluca's classes too. The university used to be a monastery, and so it had a beautiful inner courtyard with a garden surrounded by a colonnade. I read a bit about monastery gardens last year, and it's been neat to see (just like at the monastery of Heiligenkruez) how they are set up. In the middle of the garden is a tree that represents the tree of life, and then there are four walkways leading from the tree to the colonnade, which have to do with the four directions (corners?) of the world. I think I remember reading (and Pater Edmund describing at Heiligenkruez) that the monks don't ever actually go into the garden (just the gardener does...) but can only see glimpses of it and the sunlight of the open sky between pillars as they walk around it in the darker corridor. It's a sort of constant reflection and reminder of paradise and the monks' life on earth as they wait for that life.

View of the garden at
the university.

There's my best shot at describing something probably much deeper and more thought out. :) Anyway, obviously people walk in the garden area now, and Gianluca said when the students pass their final defense they run around on the grass and jump the hedges (which they're normally not allowed to do.) After that we got to see another historical treasure, a highlight of the day. The university is right next to St. Ambrogio Church, which, as you can probably guess, is very old and was founded by St. Ambrose. It was constructed in 379 on a site where many martyrs of the Roman persecutions had been buried. It was a really beautiful, simple, brick church, and we got to go inside and see the body of St. Ambrose on display in the crypt, along with two other martyrs.

St. Ambrogio

     That evening, after a restful time reading and recuperating at Gianluca's, we went to Aldo and Elizabeth's parents' house to have dinner with them and some friends of there's. We parked in a random illegal spot along with countless other cars that did the same ("Well, this isn't technically allowed but there are like two policemen for this whole area so there's no way they can give everybody a parking ticket, we're fine..."), and then while Gianluca went off to buy a cake Michael and I tried to get into the building. After Aldo opened the door from upstairs with some magic button, and Michael promptly locked us out again while trying to illustrate to me how confusing he thought the doors were, we eventually managed to get into the elevator and up to dinner. That dinner was also a real treat, I was pretty amazed to find that we had hopped on a train to go to a city that I had never seen before and didn't know a single person in, and then find myself at a dinner table in a cozy home with a group of joyful, loving new Italian friends, talking easily about anything from TAC vs ITI vs Italian university experiences, to language learning and Bible study.

What a great bunch!

We got to hear about their impressions of their various visits to the states-they were all admiration-and their complete astonishment at why Michael might want to learn Italian at all... they couldn't understand where the motivation for that might come. We also thoroughly enjoyed listening to hilarious stories from Christiano's experience (a friend who, 20 years back, attended Catholic University) of living with a Japanese roommate in college and discovering (in some unforgettable ways) the cultural differences between Italians and Japanese, and the friendship that formed nonetheless! After our delicious dinner Michael played the guitar and we all sang together. Aldo had been living in California for the past semester, and he attended the weekly CL meetings at TAC and apparently he and Michael were the "song-masters" of the group. I think they were happy to do it together again in Milan!

One with all of us. :) (Not including Pietro and Christiano,
the friends who joined us for dinner later that night.)

     Next morning our faithful host and guide Gianluca (who'd spent quite a bit of time the day before researching trains, boat rides and tickets for us) took us to see Lake Como-about an hour train ride out of Milan. We met up with another of his friends, Andrea, who had been in the states with Gianluca and who Michael had met briefly while they were on a road trip in California. The four of us had a really awesome time; Como is a beautiful, rather quiet town with a big church (surprise) and lots of old, cobblestone streets.

OUR horses were real.

There was a Christmas market of sorts still going on right next to the lake, and we also found (and paid to ride on) a merry-go-round (I think the other little child on it thought we were weird). We had lunch at a little pizza place on a side street, and then headed to the water to take a boat ride across the lake to Belagio. It was a beautiful day and it was so neat to see all the little villages around the lake, each with its own church with a steeple sticking up over everything else.

     In Belagio we did a lot of walking and exploring the tiny, quaint streets that led steeply uphill, and we took a long walk all around and enjoyed the old houses and restaurants hiding away and the beautiful gardens and sail boats on the water. After a relaxing (second?) lunch by the water we took the bus back, another lovely trip with a slightly different beautiful view of the lake and villages as the sun set.

We walked again through the square with the church, there was a Christmas light show going on, so there was snow and angels and trees projected onto all the buildings, and people everywhere. We got on the train to go home, and then Michael made a nice dinner (he was the chef for the trip) and another of Gianluca's friends, Christina, came over and we had a good conversation and played a game of pictionary telephone.  (Which we soon discovered isn't quite as hilarious with four people who sometimes have trouble understanding each others' languages, let alone their sense of humor...)

Walking on a wall in Belagio.

That night we stayed up late trying to figure out the next leg of our trip, since Gianluca's family was coming home the next day, and we ended up booking a train to Venice for early the next morning and an airbnb there for a few days. It was a little daunting, since we wouldn't have a Venetian Gianluca to help us, our airbnb host spoke mostly Chinese, and we don't know much Italian, but we just booked our train tickets and got ready to get up bright and early to get to the station and see what happened!
   

Photo credit: Michael

    Here are links to full albums of recent pictures I've been using for the blog:
Milan-- https://goo.gl/photos/yoKERoFLy4q3qZnM6

Budapest-- https://goo.gl/photos/9ZoCCjveaGaAsbyD8

Christmas in Trumau-- https://goo.gl/photos/iBKX36LFU5brkmKt8

Budapest from a few months ago-- https://goo.gl/photos/J6SV4nryeeSbpeZj7