Submitted by James Bridda on the 2017 spring semester program in Rome, Italy…
In the second week of living in Rome, you can almost feel the stress leave you. You now feel as if you have almost fully adjusted to living here, even though there is obviously going to be a lot more to come. Now that you are settled, you can sit down with new and old friends and figure out where you want to travel all throughout Europe. This past weekend, I and a couple of other students from the University of Delaware decided we were going to go to Milan. And, man, I am glad we did. The 8:20 am train ride which at first sounded awful because of the time, turned out to be pretty good because the train was so comfortable, I basically slept the entire 3 hours. Who would have guessed European trains would be so comfortable? When we finally arrived by 11:30 am, we had to figure out where we were and how we were going to get to the Duomo of Milan. Luckily for us, public transportation in Europe is pretty easy so we just had to hop on the metro for 3 stops. It was amazing how when you walk up the stairs from the metro, you are actually looking right at the cathedral. And it is huge. Between people trying to sell you stuff, hundreds of tourists and this giant cathedral staring you in the face, it is hard to really take it all in, but once you step back, you realize that you are looking at something extraordinary. The reason I love going abroad is for things like this because you will really never see something so large and so beautiful in the United States. After spending a majority of our day hanging out around this cathedral and then going inside it and seeing just how big it really is, we got to do some other cool stuff in Milan. First, we got to go to a rooftop restaurant directly across the street from the Duomo. Not as high up, but it was still amazing to be able to turn your head during lunch and see a massive cathedral less than 250 feet away. After that, since Milan is one of the fashion capitals of the world, we of course did some shopping. One thing, we didn’t get to do was see the Last Supper painting by Da Vinci, but the price of 30 euros and still having to wait to see it, didn’t really intrigue us too much. We finally made it to the train station with 45 minutes to spare, got some pizza and relaxed until our train came. Of course, I would have liked to spend more time there, but that’s the good thing about studying in Europe, I can always go back!