Life is either a daring adventure or nothing: Kim and Taylor take Italy: Milan and Venice

Hello all!

So as mentioned before, my beautiful time in Barcelona has come to an end. April 26th was D-day, so instead of fleeing Europe, my friend Taylor and I decided to head over to Italy to have one last adventure. We spent 10 days in Italy using the Eurrail pass (a special train pass). We flew into Milan from Barcelona at about 3am, and needless to say we did not sleep the night before.

When we arrived to our hostel around 10am, we were so exhausted we decided to sleep on the couch until we could actually check in. We had no trouble sleeping in the lobby of the hostel for 4 hours :P Finally we were able to check into our hostel and lucky for us, the other two beds in our room weren't occupied the whole time!

Milan is an interesting city. We knew that it was the fashion capital of Italy but we didn't know too much else. We quickly discovered that Milan was a very tiny city and they didn't have too much to offer. There were book stores and religious type stores everywhere! In the city center, we walked around this huge outdoor type mall. The architecture of it all was beautiful. We were also very impressed by the famous Duomo. As we were mindlessly chatting away coming up the metro steps, we both stopped mid-conversation when we caught our first glimpse of the Duomo. Our jaws dropped, it was spectacular!

*I'd like to mention that upon taking our first steps out for the day in Milan, my camera (and my heart) broke. Nothing that can't be fixed when I return home, but needless to say I was cameraless for the rest of my trip. Sending a huge thank you to Taylor for all of her beautiful pictures and for allowing me to steal them from her.

The outside of the giant shopping mall

My first official Italian meal -PIZZA! (yes I ate it all)

The amazing Duomo

Milan was really cool to see, but in all honestly, I'd recommend other places to visit before Milan.

Next stop, VENICE!

One of those other places I would recommend would definitely be Venice. I really enjoyed my time in Venice, its absolutely adorable! I also think that in terms of romance, Paris has nothing on Venice. Venice has such a more romantic vibe to it. I love Venice!

We took the train into Venice and got all settled in to our hostel. The first sight of Venice we saw was when we were leaving the train station we immediately stood right infront of a big canal with gondolas rowing up and down! We both freaked out the second we saw real live gondolas!!

Taylor likes photography

The gondolas!

On our first day in Venice, we just wandered the little streets taking it all in. It was so beautiful and exactly how I pictured it! We walked down all sorts of tiny winding streets and over tons of little foot bridges where gondolas went under. We ate dinner in this tiny little hole-in-the-wall Italian place. The food was out of this world. I ordered a creamy pasta dish with bacon on top and we split some brochette. Best brochette I had the entire trip. My mouth is watering just thinking about it!

The canals of Venice at night

We spent the next day walking all over the little island of Venice. We decided we'd find our way to Saint Mark's square. We must have walked about 5 or 6 miles that day, we walked everywhere! It was a really great way to see Venice though and I enjoyed every bit of it! Theres so much to see. My favorite part was just finding our way around the winding little streets and over the bridges.

Of course we did our fair share of eating, shopping and drinking. Our drink of choice in Venice was this little wine cooler called Bellini -so delicious! It was similar to a Mike's Hard Lemonade. That night for dinner I enjoyed an olive oil and chili pepper spaghetti dish. On our last night we decided to get some cheap beer and crepes and just sit on the side of a canal watching everything go by. It was a really nice moment, the guys next to us where playing the guitar which made it all the more memorable.