Our plan was to take every opportunity to explore on the weekends, but early this week I was a little tuckered out and mentioned the possibility of staying home. We had been planning on Venice this past weekend; it didn’t help that 5 of the first 5 hotels I contacted were fully booked. I was thrilled when Francois said he didn’t need to get there this weekend, so we talked about shopping and maybe hitting a soccer game on Sunday.
On Thursday, we found out that F had a three day weekend. What to do? We couldn’t “waste” a three day wkd hanging out at the apartment… but there was no way we’d find a decent hotel in Venice by this point. We talked a lot about Switzerland, but that’s at least a 4 hour train ride, which didn’t sound like much fun. We spent all of Thursday evening scouring our books and the internet, both VERY indecisive. I stumbled upon the idea of San Gimignano, a medieval town in Tuscany, which sounded pretty inviting to both of us. We found a neat hotel with views of the Tuscan hills and called to reserve a room… then we looked at train tickets! Turns out that this trip, too, would take a little over 4 hours, and then we’d have to take a cab the last 10 km to town. That long of a trip wasn’t appealing to either of us.
Then we lost our internet connection.
At this point we haven’t packed and are both a little tired, so we picked the closest interesting city we haven’t been to yet – Padua – and decided to stay home the next day and just make it an overnight trip.
So, Friday we walked all over downtown Milan to shop a little in the Fashion Capital. Needless to say, it was mostly just window shopping, but we did venture into the Versace store (4 floors!) just for fun. I saw some amazing shoes in the Ferragamo windows, but unlike the folks around me, refrained from VIDEOTAPING them.
Francois went to the store and came home with some fresh (as in, they were laying on ice in the store waving their claws, so he wrapped them up and brought them home) crabs for dinner. Unfortunately, they weren’t as good as they looked… there wasn’t much meat at all even though they were quite large, and the shell was thick and cut Francois’ fingers several times. Simeon got a kick out of the fact that we were eating crabs, but I think he wasn’t too impressed when we threw out the interesting part (shells and legs) and ate a tiny plate of crab meat. He tried it, though (along with some asparagus, and some spinach ravioli!) and gave it his seal of approval: “Mmm, I yike it!”
No comments:
Post a Comment