We left Cinque Terre for Milan early, as we were actually headed to meet a friend of Becca’s mom in a town outside of Milan called Vercelli. We arrived around noon, heading back to her family’s home for lunch. It just so happened that this day was a bank holiday in Italy, and her family was having a traditional lunch! We’re not sure how we got so lucky to be included in their day off, but we were very grateful to spend the afternoon with them.

Becca’s mom’s friend, Valentina, was the only one in her family who spoke fluent English, although her dad spoke some but had trouble understanding us, so it was a lot of back and forth through our translator – Valentina! The meal started as soon as we got there, beginning with some prosecco before starting with a large variety of appetizers. This included shrimp, sardines, chicken salad, veal, peppers, and bread! It was quite a large course just to be starting the meal, and Valentina warned us to save our appetite.

Next came crepes with ham and cheese, followed by a course of fried foods! We were told the fried foods were very traditional, as it started from savory to sweet – sausage, pork schnitzel, apple, amaretto and something similar to polenta. It was all delicious, and we were absolutely stuffed by the end of it. All throughout the meal, our hosts also kept bringing out more and more bottles of wine! Ryan also got a special taste of a fancy grappa with gold flakes in it because Valentina’s dad took a liking to him. We felt very spoiled, especially because we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into prior to arriving.

We had a lovely meal and despite the language barrier we actually got to know Valentina’s family fairly well – Valentina was an excellent translator. They asked us questions about our trip as well as really interesting questions like what American’s eating styles are. (Since they typically eat in courses in Italy).

We finished the meal off with coffee, tea, and an ice cream cake and Valentina helped us to translate our thanks to our hosts – we really felt we didn’t have the words to thank them enough though, especially with the language barrier. Valentina’s grandparents were celebrating their 60th wedding anniversary the next day and they wished us many happy years together which we will hold close to our hearts forever.

They sent us on our way with a bag full of treats which we ate the next two mornings for breakfast – yum!! Valentina showed us two churches in the area which were absolutely stunning and we grabbed gelato before catching the next train back to Milan.

We checked into our Airbnb around 6:30 pm and were still so full from lunch that it never even crossed our minds to eat dinner. We explored the area around our airbnb a bit before watching a show and going to sleep.

The next day we decided against a day trip as we had once planned, instead opting to explore Milan. We’re really glad we did! We had fun heading to the Duomo and checking out some of the shopping district. Becca was very sick of Italian food after spending a few weeks eating solely pasta and pizza, so in our pursuit of other cuisine, we ended up in Chinatown. We were glad we did, as we found a great street food place serving crepe-like dishes, with eggs, meat and delicious sauce! They were great, and only €4 each!

After grabbing lunch, we headed towards some botanical gardens we had read about. Unfortunately, this proved to be a waste of time, as we could not find them despite our best efforts. A combination of our phones and signs on buildings did nothing but confuse us further, as the gardens appeared to be in the middle of an apartment building… After giving up we set out for home, before running into a neon-pink coffee shop that Becca insisted we try.

The decor was really cute and the prices were surprisingly affordable despite catering to the Instagram crowd. We ordered coffee and matcha and headed upstairs only to find two friends engaged in a photoshoot (which lasted the entire time that we were there). We enjoyed our time and were happily caffeinated when we left. We found out later that the shop had only opened 2 weeks before we came, it made more sense why they asked us how we liked our drinks so many times.

Ryan made stir-fry for dinner in our tiny kitchen and we went to sleep early to be able to wake up at 6:30 for our flight the next morning. Not sure how Becca has been able to convince Ryan to wake up early for things this whole trip – but its been working so far!
The trip to the airport was really stressful because we had to take the metro to the main train station and then take another train to the airport from there. We didn’t time it quite right and ended up at the train station as the train we’d planned on taking was leaving. From there we walked quickly to try and see if we could take a bus to the airport since the next train wasn’t for 30 mins, but found that the busses weren’t leaving until then either.

We decided to buy tickets for the train (not included in our eurail passes) and hurried to catch it.
In all of our hurry (combined with our lack of knowledge of how to take trains with tickets – we are excellent at taking trains with our Eurail pass!) we forgot to use the machines in the station to validate our ticket after we bought it before getting on the train. Ryan realized this right as the train was leaving the station. He then looked up the price of the fine which made it even worse. We sat through 45 mins of terror that the ticket collector would check our unvalidated tickets and fine us, while we were also really angry with each other because our teamwork had disintegrated during this time.

The ticket collector walked by us an excruciatingly high number of times, but never checked tickets while we were on the train, and we made it to the airport and through security a few minutes before boarding despite being 30 minutes later than we’d hoped. We made up and felt lucky that everything worked out in the end.

When we arrived at the gate we saw a line forming to get on the plane even though boarding hadn’t quite opened yet, and we joined it. We’re happy that we did because by the time boarding opened it was snaking all around the terminal.
As we got closer to boarding we saw that there was a woman who had the sole job of checking oversized carry-ons and we began to panic.

EasyJet has a baggage policy that only allows one bag on the plane, so we weren’t allowed to take a personal item such as a backpack which we depended on to keep the size of our roller bags small. We quickly moved as far away from this woman as possible and kept our bags to the opposite side of her view. She was pulling people left and right and asking them to squeeze their (very obviously smaller bags than ours) into the teeny tiny baggage sizer they had set up by the gate.

Luckily for us a woman a few people in front of us started throwing a fit about checking her bag right as we approached the bag checking lady and we managed to slip by undetected. Our bags fit perfectly in the overhead compartment! Take that!

The flight was fairly uneventful, and before we knew it we were touching down in Lisbon! We also gained an hour in our journey because Lisbon is on an earlier time zone so we had a full day to enjoy (do laundry in) Lisbon! 😉