Category: Travel

We are on a high-speed (Frecciarossa) train from Milan to Naples. It’s the first day of our vacation. The display under the ceiling says that our train is moving at 296 km/h. It feels as if I am sitting still for the first time in the past several days.

Going to and coming from a six-months sabbatical feels less like a vacation trip, but more like moving the entire household. The amount of luggage we are taking with us is overwhelming. In our defense, we have been away from home during three distinct seasons, so just the clothes take up a lot of space. In fact, our five-year-old grew out of a good portion of the wardrobe that we brought with us. We knew this would be the case, so we didn’t even make an attempt to travel light.

Claudia, who was checking us out of the apartment, asked how we would manage all these bags at the train station.

It went like this:

I called the taxi and asked them to pick us up in a van. We took down the bags in three trips by elevator (again, in our defence, it’s a tiny one). The driver helped us load the bags into the van. At the train station, there were two types of porters, who helped with the luggage. First, an “unofficial” porter loaded the suitcases on a dolly and carried them to the platform level of the building, but he could not go to the actual platform (only passengers with tickets and the station employees can go there). From the ticket checkpoint, one of the official porters (i.e. an employee of the train station) took us to the train. He had a tablet, which showed the platform assignments for the trains a couple of minutes before the announcement was made on the monitors. This was the crucial advantage, which by itself made hiring a porter worthwhile, because getting to the train early gave us some time to figure out how to store the luggage before the rest of the passengers poured in.

We were in the “2nd standard” class coach, where the seat rows are located close to each other. The designated spaces for luggage on the floor between the seats can accommodate the “large” suitecase, but not the “extra-large”. The XL bags, surprisingly, can fit on the overhead shelf, albeit with some effort. The hard shell suitecases, which are very popular these days, are actually more difficult to fit, because they do not deform as easy as the ones made of the soft material.

Now, the train is speeding along, but it feels like we have finally stopped moving. I am ready for vacation.

During this six-months-long sabbatical in Milan, we didn’t make any focused effort to learn Italian language. That is, we didn’t enroll in any courses, and our daughter went to an English-language school.

Our friends asked us recently whether we found it difficult to function in Italy using only English. Now, after almost six months I can confidently say that it was remarkably easy. Perhaps, this is due to Milan being an international metropolis, where people of many nationalities mingle and use English as their main language. But I think this lack of communication barrier is also due to the nature of people, who live here and whom we’ve been lucky to meet.

Certainly, English is not spoken everywhere in Milan, but even where people speak only Italian, like in our favorite bakery, which we pass everyday on the way home, or in a fish store across the street from our apartment, people always greet us very warmly and make an effort to communicate.

In some cases, they very tactfully accommodate our efforts to speak Italian. For example, in a gelatteria, where we buy ice cream almost every day, I only recently discovered that the owner spoke nearly perfect English. This happened when I exceeded the capacity of my Italian and gesture language while buying gelato for a dinner party with our friends and colleagues.

Last Saturday, we went to Lake Como. Here are some notes, if you are coming just for a day trip, as we did:

1. The town to visit is Bellagio. On the map, the lake famously looks like a stick-figure man with legs striding apart. Bellagio is located right where … it makes it a subject of crude jokes.
2. There is no train from Milan to Bellagio. The way to go is through the town of Como, which is located at the end of the left foot, and not through Varenna (although we didn’t try the latter route).



3. There are two train stations in Como. A more convenient one (closest to the ferry harbour) is Nord Lago. Unfortunately, you cannot get to it directly from Milano Centrale (you need to start from Cadorna FN). The trains from Centrale come to the other station in Como (St. Giovanni). It took us 20 min to walk to the habour from there.



4. From Como to Bellagio, there are four options: bus, taxi, “fast boat” and “slow boat”. The ride on a slow boat is fantastic and is actually the highlight of the day trip. We took the fast boat on the way to Bellagio and the slow boat on the way back. The latter is much better – you are not locked inside the cabin, and the views are spectacular. It is really slow though (the one-way trip takes more than two hours). We were lucky that our five-year-old daughter was a seasoned traveler, but at that age you can get excited by only so many views of posh lakeside villas in a day.
5. A single day trip might be too short for a truly relaxed experience. We were not rushed per se, but we were aware of the boat and train schedules, which was a bit distracting for me personally.

For photography, a telephoto lens is a must-have. The slow ferry does stop at nearly every town and brings you close to the beautiful buildings, but a long lens is indispensable for compressing perspective of the multiple layers of mountain rangesMy 70-200 weighs as much as the rest of my gear, but I used it 90% of the time (not counting the GoPro, which I camped to the railing on the ferry and just let it run during the entire ride).