Molto Milano!

Wow! So it wasn’t a boring travel day, punctuated by sampling hundreds of perfume and calculating the relative cost of Bombay Sapphire in NYC versus European airports! After stopping at the internet café to let my hotel in Delhi know that I’d be late, I brought a pizza to the piazza in front of the Duomo. (I bet if I knew more about Italian politics, this pizza box would be very funny.) The Duomo is so pretty! It looks like a wedding cake, with all those pink and white spires! Inside, it’s very dark, with huge pillars supporting a vaulted roof decorated with swirling arabesques. The contrast between outside and inside is startling at first. (At the Duomo, I also picked up Jesus’ business card – the card is posted in a very prominent spot, next to a beautiful altar with Mary and the Christ Child, surrounded by offertory candles. In the midst of this scene that fits in the 1300s as well as it does today, there is a huge display saying ‘all about Jesus – http://www.jesus1.it – this contrast also struck me as funny.) After the Duomo, I caught a gelato (yum!!!) and then walked to the fort – it was a lovely day, in the 80s, I think, and it was a perfect way to wind down the afternoon.

Unfortunately, when I got to the airport we were STILL delayed. It seems that, in the face of salary restructuring and an effort to sell the airline, the labor contracts have been cut for most Alitalia staff, so they are… STRIKING! The last time I flew Alitalia, I got an extra 4 days in Rome this way. So I’m in a hotel 50 minutes from the airport with a number of other disgruntled passengers (well, I’m not disgruntled – happy to see Milan!) and watching German talk shows on ZDF. Hopefully, tomorrow we really WILL leave Milan, and I will get on to India….