round 2.

on the schedule for day number two: shopping. milan is, after all, known for it's fashion and shopping and so naturally we had to take part in that one day. first things first we walked through the square in front of the duomo and we saw a big flock of pigeons. like we're talking a BIG flock. so this guy walks over to us and puts some bird seed (aka popcorn kernels) in tracy and katie's hand and suddenly the whole flock is by us. surprise. they were literally eating the food out of the girls' hands! gross/cool/scary, you pick.after the bird family was leaving the girls thought it would be nice to give that man a tip...maybe 50 cents or something. they went to give it to him, thinking he would be grateful, but he instead said to them "no, it's 10 euros." whaat? excuse me? they tried to just give him the 50 cents or 1 euro that they had and he wouldn't take it...kept demanding 10 euros.

a. you gave them the bird seed before they didn't even ask.
b. you already gave it to them, they don't have to pay for anything.

luckily we're with a smart team and they didn't pay it. unfortunately the other two girls didn't know what else to do so one girl paid him 10 euros and another paid him 5! so dumb.

naturally, macdonalds cafe for breakfast.

the chocolate muffins were really delicious, i could have almost believed that they were freshly baked that morning until i saw one left in the plastic wrapper in the back.

then we just walked through the mall that was by the duomo...it had alot of name brand stores so it was fun to look around!

after walking through the name brand mall we went on to something a little more around our price range! our favoriteee store is Zara, anyone heard of it? i guess they have a few in the US also, but i've never seen/heard of them there. we also found a few other stores that were sister stores to Zara so they had similar beautiful things. we tried not to buy tooo much. but. a few purchases needed to be made.

after that...surprise meal time!

mmmm carbonara

then italy forgot that we liked sun and rained a bit. but it's okay at first it was humongous raindrops but then it was just light rain and not a problem!

we decided to go into the duomo to get a look at the cathedral. i just couldn't beleive how big it was. huge.

there was still another castle we hadn't seen yet that we decided to go to, the castle itself wasn't amazingg but we sure had alot of fun there! we decided to make chain flower crowns. it was a lovely break in the day.

behind the castle there was a beautiful park...and we saw this BEAUTIFU L hydrangea bush. the ccf part of me just couldn't let that go...look at those beautiful flowers! and do you know how much those cost? well, alot. (except i meant of course they don't cost that much at ccf because every flower is a bargain! come on down!)

right?

on that other side of the park when you kept walking was this arch...apparently an old roman arch. who knew! it looks alot like the brandenburger tor.

...dinner!

this one was for SURE my favorite.

gnocchi with some kind of white cheese that i can't at the moment remember. 

incredible.

we were able to make it home way early this time...we were walking around the park trying to get to the castle to retrace our steps and we happened to see a bus that we knew led straight back to our hostel! we hopped on and made it back way earlier than expected!

okay only one post left for this trip.

you guys can do it.