I'm in Valenza, in the province of Alessandria, at the home of Italians P & M who finally decided to get married after almost 10 years of dating and 5 years of cohabitation. I love their relatively spacious flat in this old building, I love the local pizzeria, I love the river Po which is passing by this small town. Most of all I love the general sensation of being in Italy again. The only thing I don't love is the only local pub which is open late at nites - far away and not very tempting in any scale.Apart from participating the wedding and wishing all the best to the newly weds the other purpose of this trip is to have a reunion of our small community which lived together 4 - 5 years ago in the caravans at Spanish coast. I've seen P & M couple of times after that, Italian L as well (we even lived as housemates in Dublin for a while) but French SB, Colombian D, Austrian B I haven't seen since. The Spaniard P, the highly dedicated scooter cleaner, I don't even wish to see. Italian E, French G, French N etc. are not coming due to several uninteresting excuses.
On Wednesday French SB picked me up at Malpensa Airport. She came from Alsace with her old car and there were some delays in the long tunnels under the Alps so I needed to wait at the airport for couple of hours. Have to say Malpensa is not one of my favourites. Neither the place, nor the name - Malpensa, pensare male, something related to bad thoughts.
We were trying to head directly to here from the airport but somehow madly succeeded in heading to Milan instead: so many road works preventing us from turning where we wanted to that finally we were just too close to Milan to skip it. What ever, a little bit of Milan has never hurt anybody. As SB had not been there before we did the obligatory tour of Castello Sforzesco, Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II and Duomo. Duomo is one of my favourite churches in Europe. Even though St. Peter's in Rome is bigger, Duomo is somehow more interesting as it looks like a gigantic gingerbread house made of lace.
Last time I was in Milan it was year 2005 and one of the sisters of L took me for a proper tour in town (she lives just outside of it). Finally we ended up getting tipsy at Iguana, having huge cocktails in the aperitivo Milanese style. This time no cocktails allowed as the drive to Valenza was still waiting. Quick pints and some pizza and that was it.
It took around 2 hours and 3 U-turns just to get out of town, traffic was jamming really nicely. SB was supposed to get a new car before this road trip so she had already removed her expensive CD player and replaced it with an old cassette player. Who still owns cassettes in the year 2008? I don't. SB does. 3 in total. About as old as the car. I'm already so fed up of those 3 cassettes that I would like to throw them out of the window.
