Cheeses and Breads

Here's some photos of foods I have been enjoying!



This is the bread I bought at La Scelta, and some of the cheese. The bel paese cheese. This is a semi-soft cheese. Not as spreadable as brie, but does not cut easily either. It's a pretty mild creamy cheese.



Oh, and here's the pandoro I got super cheap at Penny. I decided to cut it into vertical slices instead of cake wedges.



New pandoro discovery: Toast it in a pan, as my mother used to toast panetone. Use a little butter! Spread yogurt on top. Delicious.



Oh, and here are the mixed olives from La Scelta. These olives are actually way salty. Otherwise, quite tasty, and the different types do have different flavors and textures. There's one type that I swear has cumin in it!

Shoppings

After heading to the castle, I met up with my office mate Dariush for shopping down in the Duomo area. Some of the popular retailers like Geox, Benetton, Yamamay, and Carpisa have multiple store fronts within the Duomo area. We ended up visiting a lot of them! One store that impressed me was Replay, an Italian denim and stuff brand. They had a living wall garden entrance where you had to walk over bridges to get into the store.



In the San Babila area, there were some cool neon billboards.



In the square was a guy doing the acoustic rock thing. He was actually pretty good so we watched for a few songs!



I didn't end up buying anything except dinner. We had panzerotti, which are filled fried bread. We both had the tomato and mozzarella. Good, and not expensive for the Duomo area! The place we went had a lot of flavors, next time I am down there I may have to try another!

Castello Sforzesco Museum

I finally made it to the museums at the Castello Sforzesco yesterday. I will have to go back again, though, because the three hours I spent wasn't enough to see all the different parts of the museum. I spent my time in the sculpture gallery and the decorative arts gallery.



The highlight of the sculpture gallery is Michelangelo's unfinished pieta. It's set aside in its own display area, so you can take it in alone. The pose is interesting, not a typical pieta. Michelangelo changed the pose after half-finishing the sculpture, so there's a duplicate arm that is still in place.



The galleries, being in the rooms of the castle itself, also have a lot "ambient" decoration, decorative frescoes, particularly. This includes stuff by da Vinci. This sketch is in a large room, where da Vinci did the original work, but the bulk of the ceiling was retouched later in a sort of garish way. The walls, however, bear some original sketches.



I also spent some time in the decorative arts gallery. This glass is for the original Sforza family, made in part in Murano.



Anyway, it was a pretty cool trip to the museum, and really, I think I will have to go back again some day. Perhaps on a Friday afternoon, when it's free...

This Week's Shopping

Basically I go shopping at least twice a week. I don't know if it's just because I am bad at it at this point, or because the bread here goes stale overnight. I think it's in part that I can only practically carry a week of food.

So again, here are my tasty treats.



This was less than 20 Euros this time... more like 16. Since the Christmas holidays are coming up, pandoro, panetone, torrone, and more Christmas goodies are appearing. That giant thing on the left is a pandoro. I have mushrooms and a yellow bell pepper (cheap here!) and a zucchini. More butter, a bottle of olive oil, some more red wines to try, some German gingerbread cookies, and three yogurts. Frutti di bosco (fruits of the forest also known as mixed berry), coffee yogurt, and stracciatella, which is a type of chocolate chip.

I decided to brave the nice deli, La Scelta, to get some good cheeses and olives. Here it is all wrapped up... I ended up with bel paese and some taleggio. I'll show off some cheese pictures as I go along.



The nice thing is, even really good cheeses here are more like 15 Euros a kilogram.

Some Everyday Things

Here's two things I pretty much see every day when I head to work:



My building is right across the street from a small pharmacy. The symbol for a pharmacy in Italy is a green cross. This machine is in one of its street-facing windows. There's a large selection of pretty standard pharmacy stuff, with the most expensive things costing just under 20 Euro.

I don't know if the nature of these stairs really comes across in these pictures:



The rise of these stairs is shorter than a typical stair, and the run much longer. They are a pain to climb and descend. One of my office mates joked that these were stairs for horses. Probably not, but really, what's the deal? You can try to take two steps per stair, but I find that a little too slow. Usually I take two steps on one stair and one step on the next, which is a tough rhythm to get into! Sometimes I'll take one step to a stair. Most people seem to follow the two-one-two-one approach. The weird thing is that the stairs on the other side of the train station are normal steep stairs!

Italian Class

I'm taking Italian class here at Polimi. They have two levels apparently, super beginner, where I feel OK but am one of the by far best students, and then, foreigners that speak Italian. There's no intermediate level, really. So you have to learn on your own for a while.

In the beginner class, on the first day we just practiced asking and answering introductory questions. Come ti chiami? Di dove sei? Quanti anni hai?

On the second day, we worked on some vocab, and then regular verb conjugation for verbs ending in -are, like mangiare (to eat) and cantare (to sing). It was actually quite good for me, since the other Italian learning things I have been doing have focused more on conversational stuff, and I really like to have a strong grammar background. With the informal style, I hadn't really understood the rules for regular verbs.

These classes are of course full of foreign students, all of whom speak English at a decent level. One of the guys in the class is one of Marcello's students who I work with, and he knows several other people in the classes. After class on Wednesday we went out to an Irish pub to watch the AC Milan vs. FC Barcelona game. (One of the guys in the group is a Barca fan... he had to cheer quietly!) AC Milan lost the game 2-3. It was actually a pretty exciting game.



My drink for the evening was a pear Magners. Quite yummy. Our waitress was also distracted by the game, so there was no chance of a second drink until after the game!

At the Triennale

The Triennale is Milan's big modern art and design museum. I visited this weekend, and it was awesome. I went on a whim, I was going to go to the museums at Castello Sforzesco, but I decided at the last minute that I would go one subway stop further and head to the Triennale. It was an excellent choice on my part. The Triennale has several exhibition spaces that cycle at different rates. They don't let you take photos of the art, but they do let you take photos of the design.

The first exhibit I visited was art on time. A lot of the pieces were very awesome. Many of them were unconventional clocks. One of my favorites was a clock that was a calender on a roll that fed into a shredder. There was also a pretty awesome giant clock that looked like it stepped out of JT and Madonna's "4 Minutes" video. There was some cool video installations. I was not a fan of the Damien Hirst spin paintings that were in there. I prefer his grotesque vitrines. The spin paintings just look like any other craft spin art.

I also visited the installation of sculpture art by Italian artists from about 1965 on. This took up about half of the museum. Honestly, I quite liked many of the pieces. This sculpture art is very design and architecture informed. Some were kinetic, and many were plugged in or used water. One artist I liked that had several pieces in the show had exposed freezer coils in different shapes. One artist did a lot of work with standing water. My favorite from that set was a huge braided copper wire rope, suspended from the ceiling, along with big sheets of stainless steel that were draped to form shallow trays on the floor, with each end of the wire rope in one of the trays, each full of a different acid, one creating a blue oxide, the other a yellow-green oxide. I spent a lot of time in these galleries.

The place where you can take pictures is the furniture gallery. It was a very packed gallery! And you were allowed to touch and sit in many of the pieces. They were all pieces made in Italy, mostly designed by Italians, again from 1965 or so on. Some of the pieces were very normal, some very fantastical!

This chair I've seen in Forbes Life. It's folded structural felt. And seriously, it is a multi-thousand dollar chair.



And then there's lamps like this.



I have one of these in my apartment! Is mine a knock-off? I am going to give it a closer look tomorrow. Seriously though, look at yesterday's post. There's one of these lamps in my bedroom.

I thought these kids' furniture dogs were cute.



Here's me relaxing in a woven chair.



Anyway, I spent a very long afternoon there. It was great!

My Apartment

So, I am staying in an apartment by myself. I wasn't set on having my own apartment, but I am enjoying it. It's actually a fairly large apartment for one person! I'll give you a mini tour...



That's the front door on the left. This picture is taken from roughly the bedroom door. Turn around, here's the bedroom.



This apartment has double beds. It's actually not so unusual for people to share a bedroom in an apartment in Italy, but to me this is more like a hotel room. There's a little balcony behind those double door windows.



There on the right is the huge wardrobe. I can barely reach the top hanging bar. The thing is about 10 feet wide and 7 feet tall, and 2 feet deep. I need to unlame and take the last few things out of my suitcase and shove it in the wardrobe.

On to the dining room kitchen.



Here's the dining part of the kitchen. I am thinking about putting that small table on the right in the entrance area, so I have somewhere to sort of naturally drop things when I get home. It doesn't do much there.

There are 8 chairs in my apartment, 7 of which are in the kitchen...



Here's the kitchen part. Sink on the right, dishwasher, gas oven and stove, that first tall door is the refrigerator, and the storage space. There is a second fridge/freezer all the way on the left, out of the frame, but I don't have it turned on since I can't fill up the one I already have!



My bathroom is a weird shape. I can just touch the two walls, but it's really long. All the way in the back is the toilet area, with the washing machine. Most apartments in Italy have a washing machine. No dryer. You wash your clothes and hang them to dry. I am not sure I have ever seen a laundromat in Italy. They must exist for tourists somewhere. Anyway, this part of the bathroom is up a step. Next is the sink and vanity area. Lots of cabinets. The hamper is parked in this area. The towel rack is nearby. And then in the beginning of the bathroom, the bathtub!



The tub is actually long enough and deep enough to enjoy. There's a shower head, too. Here's the weird part though... there's no shower curtain, no place to put one, not even one of those glass divider shields that are very common in Italy. So I have to be very careful when taking a shower not to splash too much. If I owned the apartment, I would install a bar that turned the corner to hang a shower curtain on.

So that's the place.

More Graffiti

The actual buildings on the university campus have very little graffiti, but fences and walls have been marked up a lot. This batch is what you see when you first walk down from the train station:



These larger full color pieces have been there for quite a while. And based on how they are spaced and by and large not tagged over, I think they were planned.



This one with the stripes always makes me think of a tiger, but looking at it closely, it's about bees!



This crow one is an unplanned one tagged off to the side. In Italy, there are these grey crows, I think they are hooded crows. Grey body, but black tail, black head, black wings.

Is it Graffiti, or Art?

Following my last post, here's some street art on the outer wall of Penny Market, the discount supermarket by my house. I walk past it every week day!

The baby is medium-disturbing, the pig man is very disturbing!





I actually like the merman, even if he is a little distressing as well.





The abstract serpent is not very disturbing!

Graffiti in Milan

Milan has a lot of graffiti. Outside of the monuments and the like, it's a city citta with an industrial appearance. Bovisa area is especially like that, as it used to be an industrial area. The graffiti is a really mixed bunch. Some of it in Bovisa area is actually intentional art, other parts are more guerilla, with quick tags and stencils. Stickers are all around too.

Here's some of the stuff in my area:



I've actually seen this penguin artist before. This guy:



was by the Bovisa station on my visit to Milan two years or so ago. He's actually not here anymore...

This stencil caught my eye:



I'm right here!



Danger electricity sign... Does the hazard still exist, or is just the sign left?

More Shopping!

My most recent grocery haul from Penny:



Preserved mushrooms, olives, basil ravioli, spinach tortellini, butter twist cookies, salt, veggie broth, berry yogurt, apricot yogurt, coffee yogurt, mozzarella balls, Ritter Sport milk and white chocolate bar, eggs (by the dieci!), pesto, broccoli, focaccia... Another trip where I spent just under 20 Euros.

After shopping, I passed by a temporary street market. I have no clue what the schedule is for when it's open. But there were lots of fresh veggie stalls like this one:



I bought purple artichokes carciofi from Puglia!





The color mostly fades when you cook them. They taste pretty good, though! I used one of the artichokes as a subject for a sketch...

Castello Sforzesco

This weekend I also visited Castello Sforzesco. There's a bunch of really awesome museums inside the castle, which I didn't visit on that trip. I think I will actually go to the museums this weekend.



The castle headed toward its current form in the mid-1400s. It's actually quite fortified and has several generations of towers. The coat of arms of the Duchy of Milan are tastefully included over various doorways.



The serpent motif is used as a civic symbol for Milan.

The park by the castle is Sempione park. At the far end of the park is a Peace Arch, which pretty much looks like a victory arch.



There were a mix of details. The reliefs were neat, I was not quite sure if the figures were virtues, or subtle representations of gods, or what.



Pretty nice. I did some sketching of the architectural details.

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Catching up to the present day, the famous mists of Milan have started coming. Did you know that Milan is known for fog? I did not know that. The fog shows up right around dusk, and clears up around 10 or 11 am. It's sunny during the middle of the day! I don't know if this photo captures the mistiness. It's but basically past a block or so you can't see anything but lights...

American Sweets!

Also near the Duomo: This "American" bakery!



One of the starring attractions? Pancakes:



You can get them served with sauces, but really, cold pancakes? That is not my idea of a gourmet delight...

In general, Milan is covered in little bakeries and cafes. In the Duomo area there are several really expensive cafe areas. At any of the nicer places, it costs more to sit down at a table and be served a coffee or ice-cream than it does to get it at the counter and take it. And not a little more, often twice as much or more! The street cafe seating areas are usually pretty nice at these fancy places. Many of the ones on Via Dante had their outdoor space heaters out already. I found them a little terrifying. The flames are quite large!



Those are just showpiece ones, I think, there are other more normal ones further in, along with overhead heating lamps...