Pizza and Amarone!

Ok, so I’m a little behind on some of my blogging…. Sorry folks! I have to admit, school the last couple of weeks has been my main concern (especially since I had a 15 page research paper to turn in last week). It’s my final class in my MBA program and I graduate in less than three weeks!! Finally I can put “MBA” behind my name on communications J But really, I’m glad I started it when I did and am now almost done!



The big interpretation of the world



A couple of weeks ago our new friends in Milano, Ilaria and Francesco, took us to Design Week 2011. We had no idea this was going on, but apparently it’s a world famous expo that brought in thousands of people from around the world. The news said that it was mainly Americans and Japanese? Well, according to one of our new friends. At the expo, there were many interesting displays (many of them “futuristic” as I would say, but more interpretive instead of realistic). It was a fun and interesting thing to explore! There was an interesting alter (is that really an alter?) made of marble, a large blown up balloon that looked like an interpretation of the world, a garden with a bunch of plates on stilts (I thought it would be perfect for tea with the Mad Hatter), and all sorts of other fun creations. There was also a black house with a bright red light inside and smoke coming out. This was an interpretation of a house on fire- that was actually really cool!

  



House on Fire, Ilaria (left) and her friend



Inside the house of fire this pendulum was moving, you can almost see my reflection in it!

Tea with the Mad Hatter

After walking around at the University of Milan and seeing all those fun creations, we decided to take a train to the Brera district. Apparently everyone from the expo had the same idea!! The streets were packed at 10PM and we were unable to find a restaurant with an open table. Since it was such a beautiful night, we wanted to sit outside and watch the people go by, but there were no tables anywhere! Finally, we found a bar that had an open table outside and we took it. Turns out that they had been so busy that day that they were completely out of everything except a couple of sandwich options and frozen pizza. Hold on a sec… They have frozen pizzas in Italy!? We ordered a bottle of Amarone (hoping they had some left), and some food. Turns out, our new Italian friends had pizza and Amarone. This is NOT something they do here in Italy. It is always beer with pizza, not wine with pizza. They were pretty amused by that. 

So there we were in one of the most beautiful parts of Milan, very upscale, eating sandwiches and pizza while drinking Amarone. We also visited the furniture design school museum (I think that’s what it was called?). They showed all the things that the furniture design school was working on, and they also had an exhibit with 100 years of door knobs… Interesting. We didn’t realize that it was possible to have so many chairs on display in one place!!! One project was that the students had to take a plain white chair and design it. There were about 50 chairs of the same style, designed differently- there were some pretty awesome chairs there! One had a section removed from the center and then the student sowed it back together, pretty creative! As we kept walking, we realized that the entire level was devoted to chairs. We were so excited to get out of the chair section and see the area dedicated to door knobs!! Something new to look at! Then we realized we were excited about door knobs, time to move on…



This was outside of the museum and was covered in graffiti



All joking aside, this museum really was fun. There were crazy bottle chillers, student designed Mini Coopers, Vespas, and crazy strollers. It was also open really late (we got there around 11PM) and it was open to the public at no charge. Overall, a beautiful night with our new Italian friends- who are amazing!! They are so fun and have an energy that I can really relate to. Ilaria is very similar to my friend Lew. Very bubbly, energetic, and just wants to have fun. We are lucky to have found such fun friends here in Milano!

The marble alter