We've arrived at last

Buongiorno amici! After some 29 hours of sitting in planes and airports, we finally arrived in Milano this morning, to a chilly -7 degrees. All went well with the flights, it just seemed to take forever to get here. And this is now the third time I've tried to update this blog - I had downloaded the blogpress app and have twice already written about our first day, only to find that the app keeps failing.

We got the bus from the airport, and arrived at the Enterprise Hotel about 9.30 this morning. The staff are very friendly and helpful, and our room is very nice. Free wifi too is a great bonus.

As we were both keen for a decent cup of coffee, the language skills were put into practice straight away, and we managed to order two coffees. Moving from one success to another, the next challenge was to buy two tram tickets from the news booth near our hotel, and find our way to downtown Milan. The main purpose was to go to the Duomo, which is a truly remarkable building. We did the touristy thing as well and fed the pigeons ..the only problem is that I can't upload photos from the iPad direct to the blog site (which is why I had the blogpress app), so at this stage I can't add the photos of us feeding the pigeons, but will hopefully either get blogpress working or will come up with another way to get the photos uploaded.

We had some lunch at a nice cafe on via Dante, and then made our way back to the hotel (I was in charge of the map!) When we got back I realised that I'd left behind the connector for uploading photos from my camera to the iPad, so went for a short walk to the Italian equivalent of Harvey Normans - and typical of that sort of store, they had every gadget you could possibly think of and lots of staff, none of whom were very interested in serving. Anyway I found the connector and cable I needed and made my way to the checkout, having so far had a successful day with my basic Italian language skills - only then to find that I didn't have a clue what it was that the young lady was saying. It seems that my studies of "Italian words and phrases you will need for holidaying and shopping" pre-dated our efforts to save the planet - she was asking me if I wanted a bag for my purchases! Oh well, I nearly made it through day one without having to revert to English!!