Friends

It's been a while since my last post and a lot has happened in the meantime. The theme of today's post is friends. Wow, we miss 'em, we are starting to make friends here, and we had an oldie but goodie come visit us last weekend. I'll start with the story Malinda was referring to in her last post.

So for the last three weeks I have been taking 4 hours of intensive Italian lessons in the morning, and I've had the afternoons off to let my brain absorb all this new information. The afternoon of the day of Malinda's last post, I was in the apartment taking a nap or conjugating verbs or something; and I heard a buzz. The building we are in has a call box outside where people can call into our apartment and it makes a buzzing sound such as the one I heard. Naturally, I did not get up to answer it because I know almost no one here and certainly no one who would be stopping by at 3pm on a workday. I figured someone must have accidentally pressed the wrong button when they were trying to reach someone else. Plus I had a nap to get back to.

Maybe 30 minutes or an hour later I here the buzz again, and I feel obligated to get up to see if someone really is trying to reach me. So I go to the phone beside the door that lets you talk to whoever is outside of the building and start saying "hello?" etc. and get no answer. I even threw out some Italian greetings in case the person did not understand English (pretty bold since I would not have understood any response in Italian).

Malinda comes home from class eventually and we talk about her day or whatever and decide to go down to the basement to wash some clothes. On the way out two guys that look to be about our age are on the stairs between the floor of our apartment and the floor above us.

Guy 1 - "Mr. Kelley we are so glad we ran into you."

Me (so pumped to hear someone speak English and look my age that I almost freak out) - "Hi."

Guy 2 - "We just moved in upstairs"

Me (looked at Malinda and we gave each other a super sweet mental high-five using ESP) - "Great AND YOU SPEAK ENGLISH!"

So then we continue to make small talk and find out these guys are new to Lugano. They speak English. One is from Hungary and he is getting his PhD at Malinda's school. He also rides bikes and was a semi-pro marathon runner/triathlete. Awesome. The other guy is Austrian and is here for work. He also seems to be about our age. They moved into two of the vacant apartments above ours and were without any internet connection (we know how that feels). They could see my connection and offered to split the bill with us in exchange for the password to access our router. Done and done.

As we say our goodbyes and Malinda and I head back to our apartment, I notice the doorbell beside our door and give it a push. It makes the exact same buzz sound as the one from outside. So, then I realize that these guys have probably been ringing my doorbell all afternoon and listening to me say "hello, boungiorno, ciao, anyone there, etc. etc." like a moron while they were standing outside the door. Malinda thought that was pretty funny.

So, I hope these become some friends we can get to know well and hang out with. It's very hard to go from a place where you have made friendships that will probably last for the rest of your life to a place where you know absolutely no one and the closest person that is a friend (excluding your spouse) is 3 hours away in another city. I took for granted the ability to be able to hang out with people I felt completely comfortable with at any time I felt the urge. There is nowhere for me to go on Saturday to watch football with a friend, there is no one to call to play a pick-up soccer game or to do anything that would be "normal." The friendships we are making now are going to take a long time before we're past the point of getting to know people enough to even know if it's someone you would enjoy being around. But at least we are actually starting to meet people. And it only took 2 months....

We had our first visitor from Memphis here last weekend. My old roommate, Glenn, had to go to Milan (1 hour south of us) for work this week. He came in early on Thursday to spend a few days with us, and then we all went to Milan on Saturday. It was fun to enjoy our city with someone you can be yourself around and that you know very well. Glenn and I went to the top of Monte Bré (the mountain behind our apartment) by bus on Thursday, and I got some decent pictures, but the weather wasn't great. I recommend you click on the pictures, so you can see them full screen...Then we went to Milan the next day. Here are some words I have heard used to describe Milan from Swiss and Italians here that I think give you a good idea about it: gothic, heavy, ornate, medieval, dirty, chaotic, expensive, beautiful, busy. Malinda and I are going to add: scary subway, nice restaurants, gray, imposing, graffiti-ridden, crowded, interesting, dark. I have heard more than one person in Lugano say they do not like Milan. I wouldn't say that we didn't like it, but it certainly is different. I should also note that the sun never came out while we were there which probably enhanced the gray/dark feeling. It has every high end store you can think of and 5,000,000 more you have never heard of.

In the heart of the city is "Il Duomo," the fourth largest church in the world. According to wikipedia (not exactly known for gospel truth), the church took over 500 years to be constructed. My Italian teacher told me it took 400 years. Whether it's 400 years or 500 years, that's pretty freakin' nuts. Per wikipedia, construction started in 1386. It's the seat of the Archbishop of Milan. Napoleon was crowned the King of Italy there in 1805 and had the French government pay for the facade to be completed during his time. For that, he got a statue of himself on one of the 135 spires that shoot out 350 feet above the ground. If you are interested, you can read more at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milan_Cathedral. They also had some pretty thick books in the church devoted solely to it's history. Here's a little snippet lifted from the wikipedia page, but originally written by Mark Twain in Innocents Abroad:

"What a wonder it is! So grand, so solemn, so vast! And yet so delicate, so airy, so graceful! A very world of solid weight, and yet it seems ...a delusion of frostwork that might vanish with a breath!... The central one of its five great doors is bordered with a bas-relief of birds and fruits and beasts and insects, which have been so ingeniously carved out of the marble that they seem like living creatures-- and the figures are so numerous and the design so complex, that one might study it a week without exhausting its interest...everywhere that a niche or a perch can be found about the enormous building, from summit to base, there is a marble statue, and every statue is a study in itself...Away above, on the lofty roof, rank on rank of carved and fretted spires spring high in the air, and through their rich tracery one sees the sky beyond. ... (Up on) the roof...springing from its broad marble flagstones, were the long files of spires, looking very tall close at hand, but diminishing in the distance...We could see, now, that the statue on the top of each was the size of a large man, though they all looked like dolls from the street... They say that the Cathedral of Milan is second only to St. Peter's at Rome. I cannot understand how it can be second to anything made by human hands."

For 5 euro, you can walk up a staircase to get to the roof to walk around. For 8 euro, you can take an elevator. As my friend Glenn said after climbing to the top of Monte Bré the day before, "Stairs are for peasants and suckers." We are neither.

The view from the top is pretty amazing. All the details are unbelievable and everything is unique. The statues on the top of each spire are unique, the gargoyles that spit out water draining from the roof are all different, and the intricate details are everywhere. The guys who built it did not have Dremels either. This is all marble too. The roof is made of marble tile. The church itself must be sitting on the bedrock of the earth, because it has to weigh some immeasurable amount.

You could (and I'm sure some people have) spend a lifetime walking around this place and understanding the symbolism and history behind it all. We were there for probably 2 or 3 hours on Sunday and it's a lot to take in. We probably walked 10 miles over the course of Saturday and Sunday in Milan and I don't feel like we really saw much of it. We stuck around Il Duomo and all the zillions of shops nearby. We ate sushi and pizza, both were really good. We rode in the subway which was completely empty in one section and jam packed with people in others. We drank some beers in a bar nearby and met some guys from New Zealand who were there to watch a Rugby game (New Zealand vs. Italy). They won. It was fun, but I would have rather had a night in Memphis with the friends and family we are missing.