Italy, Vending Machines and Nazis...Oh My!

Ciao! This past week was Spring Break and four of my friends (Amanda, Abby, Joe, Kristen) and I decided that the time had come to leave our beloved Spain and travel to the pasta-capital of the world, Italy. The plan was simple enough: fly to Milan, take the train to Rome and see as many cities in between as we could. In the end, no one died. A true success. But as with everything else that has happened this semester, there were a few bruises along the way.

Milan:

After a very long day of travel the four of us ended up in the center of the Milan bus station around 10 at night. Thankfully, ye’old GoogleMaps said that we were only a few blocks away from our hostel and we left the station eager to sleep on a nice, clean bed. Well, as we got closer and closer to our hostel we began to notice that we weren’t exactly in the ritzy part of Milan. Paint fumes filled our nostrils as we walked by walls graffiti and the locals in the area weren’t exactly sporting Armani tuxes. But we finally found our hostel and were relieved to find it clean and safe-ish.
After we put our things down we ventured out again to find us some dinner. This time we not only noticed the graffiti but an unusually large number of women lining the streets. I believe they are what you call, “working” women. If this didn’t tip us off to the fact that we were in a slightly-shady area of town then the naked man hanging out of his window or the vending machines did the trick. Yes, in addition to your typical cookies and candy bars, these vending machines were packed with practical items such as condoms, pregnancy tests (you know, just in case your vending-machine condoms fail you) and pesto! Clever Italians.
Needless to say, we didn’t really see the side of Milan that we were expecting. But that just made it all the more fun.
Other things that happened in Milan: Abby was hit on by a 40-year-old British many who liked her because she was, “difficult” and Joe, Kristen and I set off a grocery store alarm by accidentally walking out of the fire-exit door.

Venice:

Our next stop was Venice. We were only there for a night but everyone agreed that with its random alleyways and beautiful buildings, that Venice was by far the best Italian city we explored. After walking around for a bit we all decided to take a break in our hostel and ended up watching about 30 minutes of E.T. in Italian. For those of you not hip on dubbed-over movies, when translated, E.T.’s famous “phone home” line is actually, “telephono casa.” Eventually we left the hostel and dined on fantastic spaghetti and red wine. All of the bars and such unfortunately closed early but we entertained ourselves throughout the night by walking around the city and choosing random corridors to explore. Everything was going fine…then we met the Nazi.
During our exploration I noticed a statue of Mary surrounded by flowers (my guess is that it was for Semana Santa) standing right outside the train station. I walked over to investigate and the rest of the group followed suit. Well while we all examined this curious sight an older man walked over and said in Italian, “Who died? Oh, Jesus Christ died.” Odd, we all thought, but ok. Then he started to try to talk to us. It was pretty late and for safety sake we all kept quiet and tried to ignore him. He didn’t get the hint and pretty soon he was trying to talk to us in English. This is about the time that my friend Joe thought it would be a good idea to ask him in German if he spoke German. “Sprechen Sie Deutsch?” Joe asked.
The question seemed to puzzle the man and he finally fell silent. We took the opportunity to leave and started walking away when we suddenly heard, “Wait! Deutsch!”
We all turn around to see the same man holding out his phone running to catch up with us. “Deutsch, wait,” he said. “Adolf Hitler is my friend!”
Confused we all looked down at his cell phone where, sure enough, he had a picture of the Fuhrer pulled up on the screen. Well, at this point we were about 99-100% sure that this man was a loony. This is also when we realized that no one in our group speak could speak German. So in what sounded like the seagulls in, “Finding Nemo,” we all started to rapidly-yell, “Nein, nein,” and quickly turned to leave.
“Wait! Adolf Hitler is my friend. Adolf Hitler is my friend!” The man would not give up and was still following us so we did what any French tourist would do in this situation…we ran. Looking over our shoulders we could see that the Nazi was running after us and could hear him yelling, “Adolf Hitler is my friend!” I don’t know why he was shouting in English, but no matter. Countering his chant was the sound of all of our seagull-voices yelling, “Nein! Nein!”
We finally found a spot to hide under one of the many famous bridges in Venice and stayed there until the shouts of, “Adolf Hitler is my friend,” faded into the distance. Thus we learned to never claim German citizenship again.

Other things in Italy:

Pisa: Random down pour that drenched us all on the way from the Leaning Tower to the train station (it started when we left the tower and ended when got to the station).

Florence: Karaoke to “What’s Up,” we don’t know the lines but the Italians can’t understand us and give a rip-roaring round of applause at the end.

Rome: Awesome pub crawl at night, brief nap in the Italian sun on the lawn of the Roman Forum the next day. Oh, and we saw the Pope! He was extremely far away and we would have heard him speak if it hadn’t been for Rob…you wouldn’t understand.