Alpine 25 Day 2 – 8/30/25: Into Milan

It was a pretty uneventful trip.
Our Boing 767 was showing its age. The automagic dimming windows didn’t really work
So I had to do some weird color adjusting to this photo.
Not the snow covered Alp in the distance poking its head above the clouds.

Arriving in Milan we cleared passport control and walked about 2 miles across the terminal to the train station.
There were a bunch of people lined up for the only two working ticket machines
But there were no lines inside waiting to talk to a real person.

Tickets quickly in hand we dropped a level down (literally, they have these cool moving ramps. It’s like an escalator without the steps.) to the platform.
Five minutes later we were on the train and headed into Milan.

This is supposed to be a photo showing Billie on the train
But honestly I was looking for a way to surreptitiously get a
shot of the model-type person across the aisle.
This is the only time a smile replaced her RBF.

Arriving at Cardona Station in central Milan (as opposed to Centrale Station which isn’t) We waited a few minutes for a streetcar.

You’ll note that this is a needle and thread.
If you look closely you’ll see the end of the thread, knotted, coming out of the ground across the street.

We learned that this is a nod to the many commuters who arrive on trains from the outer suburbs each workday and change to subways where they are whisked off to their jobs.
The significance of the thread coloring is the three subway lines in existence when the sculpture was installed (Red Line, Green Line, Yellow Lone). (The blue Line has been added since.) The knot across the street suggests the representation that the subways tie the whole city and its industries together.

While we were waiting we noted a couple of interesting stghts.

Eventually we road to our stop and walked the 2 blocks to our apartment.

This is where the fun began.
For some reason the internet wasn’t working on my phone.
I had successfully loaded and activated my eSIM.
I had bars.
Nothing worked. Which means that the ‘electronic key’ that I had received in an email wasn’t.

Eventually someone with a key came along and we followed him into the building.
We climbed up the first floor and stood at the door of our apartment.
The code for the door lock was on that email.
Sigh.

We tried a couple of things and eventually I set up on-line access to the patient portal with the doctor’s office downstairs. Got the EM Got into the apartment. Got settled in. Called the guy who was kind enough to give me the code to the key box that had a physical door key in it.

At this point it was too late to make it to the art museum we had tickets for so we decided to head out to an early supper.

Around the corner we found a pleasantly busy street with tents set up for outdoor dining.