The First Instalment

“Hello! Shall we go?” said a familiar voice that I had heard hitherto only over international calls. Only this time, the voice was barely two paces behind me. I turned around to look. It took me a while, clad as I was in a bulky jacket with the rucksack and overnight bag on my shoulders.

That was the first time I met Dee. At Milano Centrale (pronounced CHENTRRRALEY), at the entrance to platform no. 13. I had arrived barely 10 minutes ago from Torino Porto Nuovo.

The stay at Torino had been okay. The meeting even better. The shopping – zero, unless you counted the postcards. The train was at 7:10 am; I arranged for the taxi to pick me up at 6:15 am from the hotel. It was fun communicating with the Italians. They spoke little or no English at all. I still managed to have colourful conversations with my hosts in the hotel, with both of us gesticulating and waving and writing and sketching. I learnt that breakfast was prima colazione, lunch was pranzo and dinner was cena (Che-Na). We had deep discussions over the usage of masculine and feminine nouns and were ecstatic on discovering that Hindi and Italian shared similar nuances (which was not surprising for me actually, but I played along). I told them tales of India and they told me tales of Italy. It was a lot of fun, and then I had to go for dinner. So we bade Buona Cena to each other and made off. They arranged for taxi to come at Sei E Quarto (6.15), which it did. I reached Torino station pretty fast, thanks to empty roads. Managed to take a few pics on the way.

The only trouble I had was when the 'hot' water I used to shower at 5 am in the morning suddenly turned cold, and I had to finish the shower with ice-cold water in the region of 1-2 degrees. It actually turned out to be pleasant after a while.

Which reminds me, I have some photos here. These are from the various airports etc. I didn’t quite know how to segregate them by country since they are mostly trans-European in nature. So I just decided to classify the set separately.

It’s also a lil easier to go through (though there are close to 92 pics here) since the overall Europe collection is well over 500 photos!!!

Trigger-happy, anyone?