Torn between total heartbreak, anxiety, fear of the unknown and I guess a mild excitement, I got on a plane from Melbourne to Milan. I spent the entirety of 28 hours stuck between sleeping asian ladies and business men. The only thing I really remember about it now was that I watched a Brittany Murphy movie and I seriously cannot believe she is dead. And that, as a naive flyer and since I am still part child, I thought it would be a good idea to book the window seat. Which I realise now is the stupidest thing ever because I spent about 75% of the time of the flight crouched on the seat, watching the people next to me sleep. It's because I felt too polite to wake them up, so when I was literally seconds away from pissing my comfortable plane appropriate pants, I did a spider-monkey-like jump over to the empty seats behind me and made it to the plane toilet, aka the claustrophobic's nightmare.
When I touched down in Milan-town, I realised I had to make it to the student accommodation by myself. This involved such Italian cultural activities as swatting away beggars and crooks and sitting on a sidewalk of some kind of shanty-town, crying. This is the suburb we lived in for the next month. If I could liken it to anything would be like if Footscray was raped by the Bronx, it would give birth to Lambrate. On several occasions did we spot smashed out windows of cars and homeless drug addicts that looked like the members of the Prodigy. But after a while, we grew to love it, it did become our home, with creepy discomforting charm. Aside from the fact that the communal area was practically Count Olaf's kitchen, there were boogers smeared on my bedroom walls from the previous inhabitant, and someone should have advised against telling Italian men which room you stay in, in case they visit you at unorthodox hours of the morning, I won't go on to talk too much about the state of our living conditions, because I know that in comparison to other places, it really wasn't that bad.
Right, let's start from the beginning. This is my second day in Italy, the pink still in my hair and the red wined stained teeth that, I was still coming to terms with, was acceptable to have at midday, because like, fuck it I'm in Europe. I got to meet up with my fiercely fabulous friend Gen and her boyfriend, David. We spent a lot of this time drinking because, to be honest, there really isn't anything else to do in Milan, other than look at this building here, the Duomo. It is pretty cool, it took 600 years to build and we actually saw some real life dead priests in glass coffins. But it's one of those places you take a ridiculously embarrassing tourist photo out the front of it, then you're done.
I feel a tiny bit bad about it now, that I didn't ask any of my other soon to be friends in my course if they wanted to hang out with us. I found out later, everyone pretty much just sat in their rooms crying about how the Wifi didn't work. I regret this now, we could have started off with a bang.
Also, this is the last photo I took with my DSLR before it got stolen out of my bag on a train. I would just like to say a big Fuck You to whoever did that. I gave my fair share of coins to homeless people and I would have happily bought you lunch if you didn't steal my fucking camera, asshole.
But eventually it was all good, I did this cool thing that I consider "friend-speed-dating." Because by about 4 days later, me and Tammy were already going out to a club together and this was like the 3rd time we'd been drunk that week so I guess that's pretty impressive. This photo here is taken on our luxurious rooftop, that we essentially had to ourselves. I think if I had to live here long term I would have bought some furniture like a sun baking chair or whatever they're called, instead of watching Tammy laze around on her tea-towel sized towel. Anyway, we had some good times on this roof. I'm happy for this roof, it was an Italian summer and we got to watch the sunset a lot of times and it contains a lot of happy moment's on this roof.
The story behind this photo is that we went to an outdoor club that played a lot of Pitbull and the DJ would announce the song changing by tooting a loud siren noise, that coincidently is at the start of like every Pitbull song. Also, I just remembered they played Linkin Park's "Numb" and Eminem's "Real Slim Shady," and they weren't doing this as a joke, Europe is about 10 years behind on music. This is also the first time we learned that Italian men think they have the right to dance with you and touch you whenever they want, which lead to me and Tammy dancing on a podium for literally the entire night, we actually had the security guard rejecting guys who wanted to dance with us. We were like famous people, it was pretty cool.
The next morning Jake woke us up at 6am and somehow we made it to Florence, even though I was so hung over I spent the whole time with my eyes closed. Here I am in the city that's in Assassin's Creed 2 and I really enjoyed posing like Altair and making eagle noises as I synchronised my viewpoints before jumping into a hay bale below me. I also had to pay like 1 euro to use the bathroom which is like utter bullshit. I really enjoyed Florence because it was so stereotypically Italian, it was one of the first times it really hit me that I wasn't at home anymore.
Here's Tammy. We sat here and I had my 75th pizza and we had to buy water which is bullshit. We walked around for most of the day until we realised that there's only so much walking you can do before you wear your legs down into stumps and then you don't have feet anymore. Then we got back on our tour bus, literally just so that we could nap. I think the bus took us somewhere in the countryside, but I wouldn't really know because I was asleep. 20 euros well spent.
Then on the way home we accidentally left Tammy on the train and I've never been so irrationally fearful for someones life. I actually think I had serious heart palpitations and if I had to run anymore I might have just collapsed and died on the spot. After taking this ridiculous trek back home turns out she was in her room and she was fine.
Now here we are in Lake Como. Someone somewhere started a rumour that you can swim in this lake, and thank you very much to that person because it caused our tour guide to laugh right in our faces. We were under the impression that we were off on a train to relax by the side of this picturesque location. Instead, we were greeted by an overtly arrogant hung over guy whose tour guide skills peaked at statements like "I know you don't give a shit about this..." or "This thing here is pretty boring but I'll tell you anyway." And for some reason he kept slapping my hat with his hand, I think it was supposed to be a joke but it was straight up violent. Then during the lunch break he got into a fist fight with the other tour guide and then he just ditched us and left us stuck in the middle of no where. In summary, Lake Como was shit. I'm sure the place is nice on other days, because as we were told George Clooney has a holiday house there but I didn't see him so it doesn't count.
Also, on the train back a group of men were taking photos of Tammy and it was hideously creepy. We had experienced a lot of misogyny in our time in Italy, but Tammy has a black-belt so better fucken watch out.
Here we are that same day at the Holi Festival, back in Milan. It was actually an extremely fun afternoon, except unfortunately we spent the whole fucking day at Lake Como so we had no time for pre-drinks so I was stone cold sober the whole time. The music was intense ear-rapingly bangers, I had an American girl watch me dance and tell me I was her "spirit animal," and me and Tammy proclaimed our love for each other for the first time.
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