Mercer and Dad go to Milan

On the morning after the heaviest snow fall this year, Mercer and I had the bright idea of getting up early and going to Milan together on a train. We woke up at 4:30 AM, bathed, dressed, walked to the train station for our 6:20 train. The trip is only a bit more than an hour, and we were planning on spending a long day in the city. Mother nature had other plans. We spent six hours on the train, then another three waiting for and riding a bus once it became painfully clear that the trains were not going to run from Chiasso to Milano, due to fallen trees on the tracks, and we arrived in Milan a little before 3pm. But what an adventure!

Waiting for the train in Lugano station at 6:00 AM.


Mercer becomes train-lingual: SBB, CFF, and FFS are the German, French, and Italian acronyms, respectively, for the Swiss Railroad system. Here's the link for getting the train schedules in English.


Here's Mercer excited, cozy, happy, as the train ride begins... what an adventure we're going to have!


Here's the view out our window -- the two Swiss engine cars reminded us of Lowly worm from Richard Scarry books. Switzerland often feels like a storybook, and What Do People Do All Day? often comes to mind.


One thing people do all day is spend a lot of time waiting in Italy for things to work... Here we are waiting an hour in the cold for a bus to take us from Chiasso to Milano, along with about 200 other stranded travellers.


On the bus at last, chilled, but not frozen. An hour later we were in Milan. The things we saw!


A very clever experiment in scale and forced perspective. A real car, the full-sized Austin Mini, suspended from a 'string' on a hand that is blown up to wall-scale, making the car look like a toy, as well as subliminally reminding us with the "string around the finger" of our Christmas wishes, and perhaps without stretching it too much, the ad also suggests our yuletide desires to be kissed under the mistletoe. "The car turns the driver into a misguided missile," said Marshall McLuhan. In this case, the Austin Mini turns the driver into a larger-than-life action figure.


In Milano's Chinatown, an exotic snow creature made by a shy boy who did not want to be photographed.


At long last, with a map, the latest ModelTime magazine, and an all-day subway pass, we finally found the Aviation Collect Shop, which was, um, closed. But cool airbrush art on the metal gate, so we decided it was worth the photo op anyway. We met another disappointed airplane buff waiting outside, hoping beyond hope that the owner was simply on a really long, you know, Italian lunch break. No luck.


But we did see, all over the city, a former member of our former church, plastered up all over the city of Milan (including the subways), in the leading image advertisement for Italian IT company Olivetti (see the website for the picture in full clarity and to see how Olivetti is using Narya as their girl for their new tagline "Simple Is Beautiful"). The photo is taken by one David Sacks, stock photographer extraordinaire, New York City-turned-Brooklyn-married-with-kids hipster and top photographer for Getty Images. He'll be coming to visit us in April to shoot Franklin College kids as well as the Swiss Family Schuchardt, so it was a nice reminder (from the friends who brought you globalization) in cold and miserable Milan to see his images and remember that you're never really totally alone in this world.


Mercer does his best imitation of our New York City church piano player as she poses in the Milano subway advertising Italian printers. Is it not a small, strange, beautiful, funny world?

In the end, we did find Movo and the world-famous Al Soldatino, two very nice hobby shops, and the guys at Al Soldatino gave us a 15% discount off our purchase because we stayed and talked so long in our pidgin Italiano. We got home late (once the trains were running again), ate a pizza in Lugano at about 9:30 pm, and vowed to go again on a better day when the weather was more agreeable.