travel with aimee

As someone who is an absolute organiser/control freak, I love to plan to the max. However Ben said for this adventure, we shouldn’t plan it, be spontaneous and play it by ear. Thank god we did exactly that. We agreed that i could plan a rough route but we could obviously veer off it if we met people and they suggested other places. I also gave myself a rough idea of how long in each place however as we found out, this isn’t always the case as some places you may not like and so sometimes, it’s best to book 1 night first before committing to longer. That’s why travelling off season is perfect as you don’t need to book hostels in advance.

In retrospect, we should have listened to our friends in Como who lived in Italy who specifically told us NOT to go to Milan. However, it was somewhere i wanted to see so we didn’t follow their advice (Bad move from us).

On the 7th of February we left Como and headed to Milan. We had found a decent price room on booking.com for some privacy however simply booked one night as many people were advising us against the city. Thank god we did that as when we arrived we had a long walk to get there and that was enough for us to see that it was not somewhere we wanted to be. Maybe it was the area we chose to stay in, but everywhere was like a concrete jungle. Graffiti everywhere, dirty streets and a very dodgy atmosphere.

Then we got to the hotel.

It was called B&B Music hotel and we paid £22 for the night, with breakfast included.

Now i want you to imagine a typical Mafia looking man. However imagine Bleach blonde (though it was yellow) hair, very tanned, muscles, wearing a white turtle neck, gold rings on his fingers and a very large iced out gold chain. He was the spitting image of a Mafia Man. So yeah, first impression of the hotel was very much ‘oh my lord, what have we gotten ourselves into’. We got to our room and let’s just say it definitely wasn’t the cleanest. To add to it, all evening long there was construction in the building till stupid o’clock, making the loudest noises. Ben also went for a shower at one point but soon returned due to the fact it was freezing. Yeah, brilliant hotel.

It was a very unnerving night and we decided 1 night in Milan was 1 night too many. Yes there were some things we could have seen but for us, it wasn’t worth it at all. We understood why people had tried to deter us from here.

I guess the only really positive about the hotel and our time in Milan was the fact we had free breakfast. A budget backpackers heaven. It only consisted of a carton of juice, a yoghurt and a chocolate croissant but we weren’t complaining. We did not waste any time, stuffed our food down and got the hell out of there. Swearing to never return to Milan ,we fled back to the station as quick as our little legs could carry us and waited there for an hour or two for our train.

TOP TIPS :

• Don’t go

If you still are a bit like me, thinking ‘yeah but i wanna see it for myself and tick it off’ then here’s a few sights we intended to see but prioritised our sanity over.

• Duomo Milan Cathedral
• San Bernardino alle Ossa (a church with bones and skulls in the walls)
• Shopping
• See Da Vinci’s Last supper painting at the Basillica di Santa Maria Delle Grazie