Superbowl and Such

So I watched the Super Bowl in center Milano in a place called Bar Magenta. It had two big flat screen TVs (the first flat screens I think I have seen so far). The place had close to sixty people there to watch the game. 80% of the crowd were Americans desperate to find a glimpse of American football. American football clearly isn't a priority over here; probably because a lot of the Italians are tall and skinny or just small in general and couldn't take the physicality of REAL football. It was a pretty cool atmosphere as people were cheering for both teams. I was rooting for the Colts because I am a huge Peyton Manning fan and him grasping a second Super Bowl title would have hurled him into one of the best 3 Quarterbacks of All-Time. It was a pretty boring game in my mind probably because there were NO commercials!! Every ad was ESPN America so I did not see one traditional commercial which we all know MAKES the Super Bowl even more interesting. I "YouTubed" the ads and really enjoyed the ETrade commercials as always. Anyways, Congrats to the New Orleans Saints. The city deserves it after enduring Katrina and Drew Brees is a class act who deserved a ring by his performance all year. I wanted the Colts to win but don't have anything against the Saints either. This was the first Super Bowl I have ever watched where I was not lopsidedly rooting for one team (usually because I am rooting for whoever is playing the Patriots). The game ended around 345am here in Italy so it was a very long night. I also ate a delicious sandwich there called a Campagnolo, I believe. It had salami, tomato (which I took off eww), some type of ham, and a very delicious sauce which I wish I remembered the name of.

The Italian Crash Course is over thank god. It was very informative and I can now get around for the most part with a little struggle. I can order a pizza in perfect italian! The course was definitely useful but 5 hours a day is just absolutely ridiculous. I could go on a tangent about the length but I did in my previous post.

Somewhere between 9-11 of my friends and myself booked a trip to Vienna, Austria for the week of February 25th!!! I found a cheap flight from Milan to Bratislava, Slovakia. The airport in Bratislava is 37 miles away from Vienna in which I found a shuttle that takes you from Bratislava to Vienna roundtrip for 15 euros. I booked a very nice hostel in Austria for us which even has its own Mini-golf "court" as they call it!!!! It also has Wi-Fi, Foosball Tables, and all that good stuff! Might be a little tough to travel with all of that in my hostel ha. I hope to make it to Salzburg, Austria which is about an hour away but the time just might not allow it.

None of you probably care but the highlight of my day today was the fact that the cleaning ladies finally came to room and CLEANED IT!!! They finished at 12:04 pm (6:04 am in US Eastern Time). It has been almost a month since they cleaned it and only skipped our room so my roommate and I are super excited about that. This time I did not skype stalk them as I mentioned in my previous post.

I continue to love my gelato over here. My favorite flavors as of now are Cioccolato Fondente (Dark Chocolate), Stracciatella (Pretty much our Chocolate Chip), and Fragola (Strawberry). Enough with this paragraph because I am practically drooling at the thought of these flavors.

Pete from Long Island and I went to the Milano Centrale Station (the main train station) to look at tickets. It is a beautiful building with an amazing architectural style and modernism inside. We found some cheap tickets but mainly wanted to see how it was ordering tickets and if we were smart enough to operate the self-service ticket machines. Buying train tickets online is defective because you register and then it does not let you log in. If it does work for some miraculous reason, your credit card won't work. It really is just false hope.

My roommate Vince and I might take a weekend trip to Venice this weekend for the famous Venice Carnival. We will see if it falls through!

Anybody who has any recommendations for places to visit or MUST SEES please comment or email me. Also, keep up the emails as I love to reply to those of you who are interested by my blog!! Reynos4@rpi.edu