Europe trip day 18: Milan-Switzerland

Wednesday was our last day in Italy.

We checked out of the hotel and got on the road.  It was about a 5 hour drive to Milan, our final Italy destination.

Milan is an interesting city!  It's a combination of modern and ancient.

(Not my picture)

One of the coolest modern buildings I saw there is called Bosco Verticale.  Actually, they're two buildings.

I just love these buildings! 

A couple of other things to note about Milan:

--It's hard to drive here!  The roads don't seem to have any lines painted on them to divide the lanes.  It was a bit of a guessing game to tell how many lanes a street had, and where they were.

--Milan, and Italy in general, is not as clean as Austria, Germany, and the other European countries we've seen.  Not sure why.  There was quite a bit of trash on the roads.

--We've seen lots of beggars on our whole trip, and our favorites are those that are doing something for the money they're asking for-- playing violin, working marionettes, etc..  Here in Milan, we saw a young man juggling.  Or, trying to.  Poor guy kept dropping the balls.  It was pretty comical to see, but a little sad, too.  I've never seen someone look so downcast and disgusted with himself as this kid, every time he dropped the ball.  :-) :-(

We made a whirlwind tour of the city trying to find a public bathroom somewhere, anywhere!  Finally we gave up and went to a fancy hotel right next to the Duomo where we pretended to be guests and I went in to use the restroom.

Then, on to the Duomo.

Milan Cathedral is the largest church in Italy (not counting Rome), and the 3rd largest in the world.  It is a gothic building which took almost 600 years to finish-- 1386-1965.  

When we first got there, we saw the enormous line just to get tickets.  We decided not to try to take the tour, but just to walk around outside.  We kind of split up, and I ended up going up the ramp to the square by myself.  As I did so, some guards asked if I wanted to go inside the cathedral.  I tried to explain that I had no tickets, but they didn't seem bothered.  So I quickly gathered Ben and the boys together, and the guard took us directly to the handicapped entrance.  So we got to go in free, and without waiting in any lines!  How nice of the guards.

The inside is about as amazing as the outside.  I especially loved the stained glass-- the best I've seen in any cathedral in Europe.

This is St. Bartholomew.  Legend has it that he was skinned alive and beheaded.  Many works of art portray him holding his own skin.  It took us a while to figure out what it was, but once Joseph pointed it out, yep, you could see that he was skinless, carrying his skin over his shoulders.  Gruesome!

More stained glass.  Each panel was incredibly detailed.

Brigham finding another place to read.  :-)

The amazing ceiling.

After touring the inside, we walked completely around the building.  It's seriously amazing.

Then, we were back in the car!  Milan isn't too far from the border of Switzerland.
Most other borders in the EU, you just cross over without even noticing-- like going across state lines in the U.S.  But Switzerland is different.  They stop you and inspect the car, although they don't ask for passports.
As we drove near to and then into Switzerland, the landscape changed dramatically.  The northern Italian/Swiss Alps are truly breathtaking.  I took pictures out the car window, and felt like my eyes could not get enough.

We stopped near the top of the pass, and a bicyclist offered to take our picture.

Seriously, so pretty.
One thing I liked best were the cute cows on the mountainside, all of which wore real cowbells! I kept trying to get a picture, but it was hard out of a moving car, so this one from google will have to suffice:

We stopped at a small market in the mountains for bread and cheese and yogurt.  Poor Brigham got chastised by the shopkeeper.  Maybe the Swiss aren't the friendliest?
Finally we made it to our hotel.  Or, what we thought was a hotel.  It was advertised as a hotel on hotels.com, and every picture posted on the site indicated that it was a hotel.  But, it was not a hotel.  It was a hostel, and not a nice one for that, although the setting and view could not be beat.  The building itself, though, was smelly, dirty, and we were not at all happy, especially for what we paid for our room...  But, what can you do.  We tried to make the best of it.  Ben took some pictures to document the quality, or lack thereof, to send to hotels.com in the morning.
We survived the night, however, although it did taint our impression of Switzerland just a bit.  :-)