Ciao Ciao Italie
Well we've finished our tour of Italy. Gosh it feels like we've been here for a lot longer than ten or eleven days!
Just before leaving our Castle accommodation, we did a day trip over to Siena. This is yet another gorgeous little walled town. What made this one pretty memorable is that once a year they have a crazy-arse horse race around the central piazza called 'Il Palio di Siena' - the most famous horse race in Italy. We weren't able to be there on the day of the race, but we did get to see all of the preparations and could imagine the absolute mayhem that would occur during the race. Pretty amazing clock tower, as well. Would have made Marty and Doc proud.
Entry into the town - I think I had this Lego kit.
This is the central piazza - they've laid down clay in preparation for the race
The very steep clock tower...
So like I said, we weren't at the race. But if we had been there, I could have made this six minute video for you.
Imagine your pleasure at sitting through a home video 'cleverly edited' to make you feel like you were there. In fact, imagine if this entire blog was filled with such efforts, so that each time one came out you were 'treated' to 5, 8, or even 10 minutes of home videos. Imagine.
As it stands, we didn't make that video, and won't be putting up anything like that in the future. Click through at your peril.
Following Siena, we left our castello and our tour of Italy finished with a slow paced day in the walled town of Lucca and then a marathon day in Milan.
After a morning run along the tree-lined path that runs along the top of the walls of Lucca, we grabbed the bikes from our Airbnb apartment and toured around town to check out the sights.
The last day in Italy started with a 4am wake up, a three hour drive to Milan to get there in time for a meeting Michelle had at the University, a dash across town and back for a whistle-stop tour of the World Expo (with food as the theme this year), and a mad run to get the train to Lyon which got us to our apartment at 11:30pm. Phew - not sure how we thought that would be a good idea.
So now we can say we've been to an Expo. And I'd love to say how amazing it was. But I'm not sure I can do that. I mean, it was BIG. If they were trying to impress upon us how BIG the world is through the use of a 1:1 scale model of the earth and all the countries on it, then I'd say they succeeded. We didn't even make it to the end of the main 'aisle', if you can call it that. This aisle would have made the Romans proud - a model of straightness.
After 45 minutes of walking down the main aisle we decided we'd better turn back, because a) we didn't bring our tent and b) we did have a train to catch to Lyon later this year. But before we left we did have time to duck into a couple of pavilions. They were normal sized. The Italians put on a 'grocery store of the future' exhibit, where interactive screens told you a bit more about what you were buying. Given people can't even muster the energy to read the label, I'm not sure this is going to fly. But gawsh it looked perdy.
The German pavilion was pretty cool - they gave you these blank cardboard pamphlet/bookie things, and as you walked around and held them up, different videos would play on the book depending on which display you were in.
Anyway, that's probably enough about the Expo. Really we were just in Milan to meet this guy for Michelle's work, so we had half a day to kill. I could go into some detail about how crap the British pavilion was, but I actualy feel kinda sorry for the attendants who had to greet us and act all excited about it! and I don't think they need any more sadness in their lives.
So that's it for Italy - Ciao Ciao says it all. Next stop, cheese eating in Frrrance.