Milan, 6.5.-8.5.

I hate Charles de Gaulle. Not the man himself, of whom I have no strong opinion, but the airport. The food is bad and expensive, and so are the shops. Besides, I am afraid of flying quite enough, and I would like to relax in the airport without being concerned that that roof will fall on me and kill me. Grrr.

Milan, against all my expectations, is quite a nice town. One can see from the architecture that it has been owned by Austrians for a while, and yet it is unmistakably Italian. Nice buildings, nice streets, nice boulevards, even sane drivers.

My hotel is right near the Central railway station, which is unbelievably monumental with its huge arches. Supposed to be a bad area, but isn't.

The city was built by Romans. The subway and the trams looks like they were built by Romans too, and never repaired since, but they are fully operational. The subway stations have endless underpasses and look very deserted, except in the very center.

The cathedral is lovely, especially the roof. You can actually walk on it, which is something I have never seen in any other cathedrals and which I highly recommend. There is nothing quite like standing on the roof of a proper Gothic cathedral. The inside is very good too.

There are some guys in front of the cathedral trying to force what looks like bird food into people's hands. There are a lot of pigeons, and people are feeding them, but I have no idea of why these people want me to feed pigeons rather than throwing the food to the damn pigeons themselves. Why would anyone want to feed the damn things anyway? They are annoying and shit everywhere.

I find the Italian men quite unattractive, not only in comparison to Finnish men, whom I happen to like, but even in comparison to other men from the Mediterranean coast of Europe. What distinguishes them in my eyes is not some particularly horrible ugliness - most men there, just like everywhere else, are about average-looking - but a total absense of any significantly attractive men. It's like the better half of the attractiveness bell curve is missing. I have sometimes wondered how and whether Italian women settle for them.

And guess what - they really don't! I swear, no guy in this city ever gets laid. Ever. I can't think of any other explanation for the fact that I couldn't walk a couple of blocks without some guy coming up and trying very hard with that "Help me, Obi-Wan Kenobi, you are my only hope" look in their eyes. There are places where men approach me often, but nowhere near that often. It felt like being the only woman in a city of men, even though there were other women around. At first I was polite to them, but four guys in an hour will exhaust anyone's politeness. Some of them were pretty weird, too. One accused me of being a teacher of geography. Another one followed me around for half an hour so annoyingly that I considered waiting for him in some alley, jumping at him and demanding to know who sent him. Did not do it, though, because the last time I did it the poor fucker almost got a heart attack, and all I said was "boo!" But I digress.

There is a castle, too. Not very impressive but well worth a visit, and it has a nice park behind it. There is also the church where Da Vinci's Last Supper is located. All the tickets sold out till June. Bugger.

La Scala is not very impressive as a building. Galleria Vittorio Emanuele is very beautiful. Italians always build beautiful things to commemorate Vittorio Emanuele II, probably because he kicked the pope's ass out to Vatican.

I don't like Italian food much, but they always have bars open and the bars always sell perfectly good sandwiches to go. Hmm. Ugly men and bad food. Too bad they have such a beautiful country that I just had to go and visit it for the third time. And will do it again, too.

In fact the food is not actively bad. One can go to a supermarket and get fairly nice stuff, though not as nice as in France or Spain. It's just that you can't get anything really nice in a restaurant. I look at the menu - any menu - and all the edible things on it are the stuff that you can just as well buy in a supermarket. They have perfectly good seafood salad, grilled eggplant and fresh tomatoes. I can live on that.

On Sunday afternoon I go to what passes as the waterfront here. It's one tiny river or canal, but it's nice there. They sell some cute cheap jewelry along the canal, and there are pleasant wine bars.

On Monday morning I an waiting for Benka (my mom) at the station near the huge turtle (don't ask). I know that the plane has landed but it takes her two and a half hours to reach the station. I start suspecting that the bus had to be pedalled by passengers but it was just in a traffic jam. We buy train tickets to Venice and go.

Gotta get the photos up sometime soon.