Valentine's Day without Taco Bell

Most people would have titled this post "Valentine's Day in Milan", but considering it was our first Valentine's Day since 2004 without Taco Bell, that seemed much more unusual than the fact that we were walking around a new city.

Miranda's former neighbor, James, came to visit for two weeks, so we decided to use this opportunity to travel. We took an overnight cruise two weekends ago and spent last Friday through Sunday in Milan. These two trips led to some cool experiences, and now we can rank an awesome British couple on our list of friends, as well as a handball player that used to play on the Swedish national handball team. We also ate the world's best fresh mozarella cheese pizza in Italy...and separately ate a bit of boiled tongue.

We'll come back to some more of those stories later, including a trip to the Ice Bar in Stockholm, but for now, we just want to make a quick mention of Milan.

Milan was cool, even though we've been told it's the ugliest Italian city. I don't find that very hard to believe...it had areas that were absolutely amazing, but the other 75% of the city was filled with mismatched buildings that were black from the soot of the millions of miniature cars lining every single street. Plenty of piazzas, but very little green space. But to be fair, the ugliest city in Italy is still better than the prettiest city in the U.S. To end, Milan was amazing. I can't wait to see the rest of Italy.

Miranda just told me that picking her favorite three photos to include in this post will take hours, so instead I'm going to make you wait a few days to a few weeks until we catch up on our Picassa albums. Sorry! As a teaser, here's a picture of the Duomo:

I also have a lot more to write about Milan. Hopefully I can tackle some of the extras on my train rides to and from work tomorrow.

P.S. I think my German blood must have a little Italian in it. Between my skin tone and thick black hair, I seem to have more in common with those southern Europeans than their near neighbors to the north. The random Germans we met on Saturday night even told me that I look Italian!