Milano

After the mandatory hours on the road and a few very culture filled truck stop visits we reached the city of Milan. Vinny hyped it up with stories of girls on previous tours coming back to the bus accompanied by their weight in new clothes, and he warned the guys on the bus to guard their credit cards from their girlfriends and wives. To be honest though, I didnt find the shopping all that amazing. It's really only a fashion capital for people who can afford to visit the flagship stores of fashion houses such as Versace, Armani, Prada or Dolce & Gabanna. Everything else is similar fare to what you would find in any major city in Europe- H&M and two Zaras on the same street.

/It's only Zara, but it's the fanciest Zara I have ever been in

The exception to this is the Ferarri store where you could test drive a Ferarri for 15mins costing you €80. Jake and Brian were pretty keen, but in the end only the Australian boys did it. I'm assuming the one guy didn't mention that he had been in jail the day before. Shereen and I climbed the stairs to the roof of the Duomo, which thankfully wasn't nearly as much as a task as the bell tower in Florence. It is absolutely beautiful architecture up there and you also get quite a good view of the city, even though you aren't up that high.

We had lunch at a place Vinny recommended called Luini which sells panzerotti. It's kind of like a calzone but hand sized and fried instead of baked. I had ordered two because I was so hungry and I'm glad I did because they were amazing! One had spicy salami, the other pesto and mozzarella. We also took another of Vinny's suggestions and went to Grom for gelato. It is all organic with no artificial colours and flavours etc etc, but my mint-choc-chip was terrible, it tasted like toothpaste and the chocolate was very gritty. Shereen had fig which she hated (I didn't mind it but i'm glad I didn't order it) and peach which she liked but she complained that if she orders ice cream she wants it to taste like ice cream and not actually a piece of fruit.

We had just enough time to visit the palace grounds for a sit down before we had to meet the group for dinner. We had another great table including Megan, Jake, Jess, Brian, Kayla, Paul and Leisle. The meal consisted of saffron risotto, which besides being yellow didn't resemble something saffron flavoured at all to me. I left most of that but the main wasn't great either: veal parmigiana that was cold and must have been ready made and sitting there waiting for us when we stepped in the restaurant. Dessert was a different story. We had chocolate cream filled profiteroles, which I really enjoyed, though I had to scrape most of the whipped cream off the top because they were drowning in the stuff. The Americans hadn't heard of profiteroles before and they were looking forward to them, but our table got ripped off when we told the waiter we were two desserts short and he said he would bring more but returned with lemon sorbet instead as they had run out of profiteroles! So Jake missed out as did Kayla which was a shame.

We then caught the bus to our hotel for the night. We didn't stay in Milan because the Grand Prix was being held there he next day and the roads would be closed off preventing us from getting to our next location which was Lake Garda- which you will hear about in my next post! Xx