Thursday, May 01, 2025

Quibbles

We actually arrived in Doha a few minutes ahead of schedule, so there was plenty of time to navigate the three and a half hour transfer.


Pirate Pete wanted a photo of him witnessing the dawn over the desert after escaping the belly of the whale. When I pointed out that it wasn’t a whale, but an Airbus A380, he accused me of quibbling.



I got through security, found my gate, and then curled up on a big, deeply cushioned booth chair, probably intended for fat Americans to sit in and work at from the integrated table, and catch another hour or so of fitful sleep.


The flight to Milan was on a smaller plane but it was similarly crowded. I don’t regret saving myself over $200 and getting an aisle seat rather than an exit row for this shorter leg, but it was a reminder of why it’s $200 less. Other people really are terrible – a couple of rows ahead of me I noticed a leathery Frenchwoman who shoved her seat back before the flight had even reached cruising altitude, then stuck her feet up against the seat in front of her. Then, trashiest of all, started watching ‘Wicked’. If the technology allowed it I’m sure she would have been watching without headphones.


Later, her seatbelt, which of course she hadn’t fastened, and had instead draped into the aisle, got caught in the wheels of the beverage cart. Other passengers had to help to free it, while she just ignored it and continued watching her movie.


A little after midday we landed at Milan’s Malpensa Airport, and I dragged myself and my luggage through the immigration and customs process, which has thankfully been automated to a large degree so there a fewer queues and fewer interactions with dismissive Italian bureaucrats. Then it was just a matter of getting to the trains and shuttling into Milan, which I managed although I’m pretty sure I didn’t do it correctly – I got conflicting advice on whether my ticket needed to be validated or not. Fortunately there were no ticket checks at any stage of the journey, and once I had stepped out into the grand marble concourse of Milano Centrale it became a moot point.


My hotel, a block or two from the station, is somewhere between a youth hostel and a hotel, with tiny, basic rooms and limited facilities. But it’s clean and well-maintained and does everything it needs to do, and for noticeably less money than most other hotels on this trip, so I’m happy.




By now it was about 4.30pm, or close to midnight in Perth, so before I succumbed to exhaustion I decided to pop over to the Muji store at the Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano to pick up a box of my favourite fine tipped blue-black pens that I use for journaling, since I’m down to the last scrap of ink in my last pen, and there’s no Muji store in Perth.


Biblioteca degli Alberi Milano, or BAM, is one of my favourite places in Milan, especially in the last hour of a hot, late spring day, when the people of Milan step out for an after work stroll. There’s a glorious sense of rightness to the place. The park is covered in wildflowers that are sown in unstructured plantings, and it’s overlooked by the benevolent totems of the Bosco Verticale, which draw this nature up from the ground and project it into the sky. Although the park is crowded, no one is drunk, aggressive or angry. The youths strut about in immaculate streetwear, so pristine that it’s either brand new or lovingly laundered by mamma. Older Milanese stroll in well-worn chartreuse sneakers or ruby-red corduroys. Everyone is just meandering about, being social. Back in Perth, any similar promenades we have are either lawlessly dystopian or heavily commercialised, which makes the real thing in Milan beautiful in its innocence.




After getting my pens, I felt invigorated enough to wander up to the Isola, the fashionable bar district I haunted on my last visit. I found one of the bars that had made an impression on me last time, partly due to the superior drinks and snacks, and partly due to the owner being a doppelganger of Stanley Tucci.


The drinks and snacks were as good as I remembered, and Pirate Pete finally found something to smile about, as he claimed a bar snack for the pirate queen. When I asked him which pirate queen, he qualified that the claiming was the important part, and accused me of quibbling again.





It’s a bit against Italian culture to take aperitivo by yourself; it’s meant to be a time of catching up, connecting and conversing with your multitudinous charming and stylish friends. I apologise for being a solo traveler with no friends apart from a small plastic pirate… and I’m not convinced that he isn’t just using me for international travel.


Neo-Stanley Tucci wasn’t around when I arrived but he turned up as I was settling my bill. With a little prompting he seemed to remember me, and was delighted to find out that his bar had been one of my favourites.


I returned to the hotel a little before 8pm, and could finally lay down and sleep.

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