Yes, we are nerds
Yesterday marked our last day in Italy and our only day in Milan. We had another great breakfast at the hotel in Venice before hopping on the train. After a quick ride, we eventually found the machine for the Milan transit tickets and we were very lucky to have another tourist offer to help because it was the most confusing self service machine we’ve seen on the entire trip. The other weird thing was that the metro station looked deserted other than us and two other tourists that had gotten off our train. After we got our tickets, we went down to the tracks which were also empty. We started to get worried that that line might not run on Sundays, but then it showed up and we took it right to the hotel.
We dropped our bags and then ignored the crowds going shopping and going to appreciate the fashion of Milan. Instead, we followed our own interests and went to the Leonardo da Vinci National Museum of Science and Technology. It was very well done and had a lot of very interesting exhibits.
Each room was transformed to be the exhibit, it wasn’t just cases with descriptions, which meant that you felt immersed in each topic. Many of the exhibits even had games you could play or videos you could watch. We started in the basement with Italy’s Industrial Revolution and learned about their factories and machines that could speed up things like nail and pipe production. The next exhibit was centered around waste and recycling and had a lot of interactive games/displays to emphasize different aspects of recycling, composting, and waste.
Following the waste exhibit, there was a very interesting hallway that illustrates the use of color in society and some of the stigmas around different colors based on how they’ve been used in the past. Along the hallway was a series of squares each painted the color with a short blurb on its relevance. The topics ranged from Black Friday to Black Panthers to Silver Economy to Red Hand to Blue Monday and so many more. They were really cool to read about and it was interesting how many of them were directly related to the US. Isabel took a long time in this exhibit and finished to find Stephanie watching a video about AI and its influence in different fields including medicine, education, and hospitality.
Another interesting exhibit was about food and how food production and storage changed over the years. It was set up with large screens playing videos of people from different time periods telling their story. It was as close to seeing moving and talking pictures (like in Harry Potter) as exists. One of them told a very interesting story about refrigerators becoming available in homes (rather than just stores) and the shift from going to the store every day to being able to store leftovers and essentials. We also heard from a man who described his job as a “link” because he was like a link in a chain that transported ice cream to the stores. He emphasized the importance of keeping the temperature low enough in every step which meant that every link was vital to the end goal.
Our favorite exhibits were the space exhibit and the da Vinci exhibit. The space room covered all of space history including the US reaching the moon, lots of different spacesuits, a moon rock, and games where you could build a spaceship and see if it would reach an orbit. It was really cool to see and we had fun looking at it all. The Leonardo da Vinci exhibit felt like they were trying to put us into his head with projections of his art on the walls and his inventions displayed all over the rooms. It was a lot of fun to see it all and very interesting to see how they combined his sketches of living things with his architecture and his artwork and his weaponry.
We headed outside to look at the other buildings and were very happy to find a good truck (there hadn’t been restaurants near the museum for lunch) and so we got some food before heading into the next buildings. The first had a lot of trains from different time periods and the next had a huge boat, a small plane, and a hang-glider. It was crazy how huge the boat was considering it was inside the building. This was the last thing we looked at before we headed back out.
We decided it would be a smart idea to go check into the hostel so we could move our bags into the room and take some stuff out of the day pack, so we headed back that way. After checking in, we realized we had a cube to ourselves inside of the dorm room. It was kinda crazy but it was very nice and much easier to sleep without as much light or noise.
After moving our bags, we decided we should actually see what Milan is all about so we went over to the Duomo of Milan, which is breathtaking. We walked around all sides of it and wandered up and down some of the streets around it which were covered in huge fancy stores. The streets were filled with people carrying lots of shopping bags going from store to store. We definitely didn’t have the money for that (especially after Murano) so we stuck with walking around outside.
When we started getting hungry, we went back to the hostel because we decided that the restaurant prices would be better near a residential neighborhood than next to shopping central. We ended up at a cute Italian restaurant and ordered a 4 cheese pasta, risotto, and salmon tartar with avocado. The risotto and salmon were both delicious but the pasta was a little undercooked and had too much peppercorn. After dinner, we went back to the hotel and cashed in our tokens to get a welcome drink at the bar before going up to shower and get settled in our cube for bed.
We got a good night sleep before a very early morning and are now officially in Switzerland!
