After a busy month of trips up north it was almost a relief to go abroad.  In the space of 18 days 4 of our 6 games had been at Preston, Burnley, Hull City and Everton, including two midweek games.  We’d also made the mistake of taking on additional passenger for two of these games, which made the trip to Hull in particular longer than it should have been.  Despite the age of said passenger it was a bit like taking a large child with us.  Wolverhampton away on the Saturday before the European trip at 3 pm seemed a novelty by comparison.

When the draw had come out and we had Internazionale Milan it had a certain inevitability about it because of the Jose connection.  It was also the toughest draw possible so all that stuff about winning your group doesn’t always pay off.  It was back to a city I’d been to before but to see a different team from the game in 1999.  I was all booked up on the day of the draw with flights to and from Malpensa with Easyjet and a hotel with a good 3 for 2 nights deal.  In fact this was booked so far in advance that when I was making arrangements with one of my mates to meet up I couldn’t even remember which night the game was on.  It was strange the week before when they were playing Champions League games and I don’t really like this new idea of spreading the round over more than one week.  Television money rules though.  I did have a slight hitch when buying a new map though as I couldn’t find one that went out far enough to cover my hotel, something I hadn’t factored in when booking.  But I was fairly confident I’d find my way around.

So it was a nice middle of the day flight out of a wet Gatwick on the Monday.  Not many Chelsea fans on my flight and no one I knew.  At the other end I’d worked out I could get off the airport express train one stop before the centre.  So I came out of this anonymous local station and started walking in the right direction.  I was off my map but had looked online the day before so managed to find the hotel with some ease.  Seeing as it was a chain hotel it did seem a rather strange location in terms of transport links and location.  I checked in and was high enough up to have a view, but not of anything recognisable.  I went for a wander and found that the Metro stop was only 6 or 7 minutes away and handily was the end of the line so I wouldn’t have to remember where to get off.  Like a lot of European cities Milan offers very cheap public transport.  You can buy a 48-hour pass for all local transport for only 5.5 euros.  I went into the centre, which didn’t take very long and went for a wander around some of the more familiar sights.  My guidebook described one busy street as having lots of cinemas so I explored out of curiosity and found very little.  One was closed, one had only three out of many screens showing anything and the third was very well hidden, hardly the West End of London.  I also found the Inter shop, which was quite large and also included a small museum in the basement.  I’d made a mental note of a nice looking restaurant and returned there to eat.  The waiter immediately sussed I was English and decided to recommend some dishes and it seemed rude to argue.  He didn’t make a bad choice and the food was good if a little pricey.  A young English couple were sat next to me and she was trying to practice her Italian with the waiter.  She wasn’t having much luck as every time she tried to thank him he’d correct her pronunciation and say it wasn’t a Spanish gracias but grazie.

The next morning it was a bit less grey but there wasn’t much in it.  I went exploring and hadn’t realised before exactly how massive the main station is.  Glancing at the timetable I wouldn’t want to be travelling to away games in Italy, especially with Lecce sitting on top of Serie B.  It is 11 hours by train from Milan, even Rome and Naples are long hikes.  Next stop was the castle and the main park behind it.   The park only seemed to have dog walkers but it wasn’t really a nice day for any other sort of walk.  The tower, which is supposed to give a good city view, was closed and the sports ground in the park seems to be used by the local rugby club and some football team though I couldn’t work out how high or low a level the latter play at.  I spent most of the day doing a mixture of wandering around on foot with the occasional tram journey.  I didn’t have much luck with what I tried to track down.  The cinema museum I found on my map was closed with a very long explanation of why on the gate, but only in Italian.  I decided the art gallery entrance fees were too high as the two I looked at were 12 and 15 euros!  So I though I’d try the Leonardo da Vinci science museum.  On my previous visit my mate hadn’t persuaded me to go to it and this time it was closed.  I knew it would be closed on Mondays but it was also specially closed on Tuesdays at the moment to help refurbish it.  Finally I visited the area round the canals only to find that most of the water appears to have been removed from them, very strange.

I went back to my hotel briefly and got in touch with Andy who had arrived with his better half, Jill.  They were staying much more centrally than me and we agreed to meet up to have something to eat.  It only took me 25 minutes to get there and we found a pizza and pasta place that was quite pleasant.  So we had a good long chat setting the world to rights and working out what the Blues might do the next evening.  By the time we’d done this it was quite late so I made sure I got the Metro before it shut down.  I’d also taken the opportunity to work out alternative routes back to my hotel for when we would inevitably be kept in after the game.

The next day dawned with some blue sky around for a nice change.  Having navigated round a building site I investigated this strange looking building, which turned out to be the main cemetery.  They really go over the top with this sort of thing and even a five-minute glance showed that there must be a large amount of trying to top the neighbours in how many statues you can get on one family tomb.  Stranger still when I was back in London I saw a trailer for a film due out soon and suddenly Tilda Swinton was walking through this exact spot!  Clive was on another day trip so I arranged to meet him and we went for the most obvious meeting spot in the square in front of the Duomo.  Similar to our trip to Turin last season there seemed to be an awful lot of Inter fans already wandering around kitted out in their match day gear.  Obviously a lot don’t live locally so make a day of it.  This did mean that the club shop was reportedly heaving with people so we left that for later.  We kept bumping into people we know and even managed this up on the roof of the Duomo.  The view over the city was okay but it wasn’t a clear enough day to see any Alps.  We then met up with Andy and Jill and went into this coffee shop.  The coffee and cakes were good but Andy chose hot chocolate and that is exactly what he got.  Expensive chocolate melted and put in a jug rather than mixed with milk.  He did find it a bit much and taking a taste I don’t see how you could drink even a small jug of it.  We went to the club shop and it had thinned out now and we got some souvenirs and looked at the museum.  We agreed to meet later and went our separate ways but quite slowly as by now we kept bumping into people we knew.

When we met we decided we might as well go to the same restaurant, as before, though it was more crowded this time.  One group of Chelsea fans were an embarrassment, as one drunken bloke really seemed to believe speaking to the waiter loudly in English would help!  Like a lot of meals this one seemed to slow considerably as it went on so we probably didn’t leave quite as promptly as planned.  Despite advice against it we’d decided to get the number 16 tram to the ground.  It wasn’t as crowded as we’d expected but wasn’t very speedy as a lot of the route is shared with cars.  We then got to a certain point and we were inexplicably all turfed off.  The police asked if we were Chelsea fans and although we said yes they didn’t mind us walking off rather than getting on the bus set-aside for us.  Other buses were packed with Italians and we decided to walk the rest of the way as we could see the stadium lights.  It seemed rather chaotic round the ground but when we got round to the away section it wasn’t crowded at all.  Andy and Jill were sitting elsewhere so we said our goodbyes again.  It was still probably the latest I’ve gone inside a European away ground in quite some time.  When we played AC we’d been relatively low down but this time we were at the other end right up in the top tier.  So it was a long climb up walking round one of the modern looking corner towers.  They only look good when lit up and are really as scruffy as the rest of the ground.

We had the usual Italian thing of keeping us in for no apparent reason and then once we were out they didn’t really seem sure what to do with us.  Loads of Inter fans were still around so what was the point?  I walked back towards the ring road with a couple of people I know before they went off to their hotel.  My transport research had identified a bus that should go right past my hotel and I actually found it where I expected to and then bumped into some more people I knew, before getting back to the hotel just after midnight.  In the morning I then met yet more people I knew at breakfast who had only been there for the one night.  Chatting to them slightly delayed my departure plans but eventually I checked out and set off for the anonymous local station.  The plan was to get the train to Como and spend the day there before going directly back to the airport.  All properly worked out with train timetables and the multiple tickets needed.  Unfortunately I didn’t get the first bit right deciding to get the tram to it’s end point instead of the bus.  So off the map again I was guessing which way to walk from the tram terminus.  I found a bus stop but when the bus arrived it didn’t seem to have the right destination on the front but I got on anyway.  When it stopped I assumed this was the destination on the front and wasn’t sure where I was in relation to the station.  So I ended up back tracking to another bus stop before getting on another bus with the same number but the right destination on the front.  When he stopped where the first one did I was a little confused to say the least.  Turned out the station was very close by, but I did say it was anonymous looking.  The first bus driver had obviously changed his destination board for the next journey in the opposite direction and had totally thrown me, though I did feel foolish once I realised where the station was.  So, of course, I’d missed my train by now.

So I bought a paper and tried to decipher the match report from the night before while waiting.  The train journey was only about 45 minutes or so and it was trying to brighten up a bit.  Como itself was much as I remembered it from my previous trip except it was harder to work out when the boats were running.  In the end I decided the necessity of getting a train later meant I’d concentrate on the town not the lake.  Plus I wasn’t sure the trip up the lake could possibly match my previous visit there especially as the weather wasn’t as good.  So I spent time wandering up the shore and exploring the centre of the town.  I never got round to finding somewhere I fancied to sit down and eat properly ending up grabbing a snack of a slice of pizza instead.  I had thought I’d been seeing things earlier on the lakeshore when I saw our passenger from Hull sitting there.  I couldn’t work out how he could have found his way there alone until later I spotted another familiar face and guessed they’d be together.  This proved true when I decided to get the funicular up the mountainside.  Looking up I saw him loitering having a cigarette, no surprise there, before realising he was getting on to go to the top with his friends.  Somehow they didn’t see me and at the top I went out the lower entrance and they never saw me and missed the trip down that I was on.  I just didn’t need an inane conversation, which probably would have started with “Fancy seeing you here!”

So after a final look at the lake and town centre it was back on the train.  The train stops everywhere up to a certain point before going fast back into Milan.  But it was now dark and being a European style double decker train made it hard to see some of the station names.  At one point a local asked me if it was a certain station, I didn’t have a clue!  Luckily the station I was changing at was larger and I had been through it twice so it turned out to be quite recognisable.  I had to get my final ticket of the trip and looked in vain for somewhere selling coffee that was more than just an espresso.  Strangely the train to the airport seemed largely full of commuters and as it is a more expensive ticket this surprised me slightly but maybe they just liked the faster service.  At the airport it was then on the bus to the new second terminal that Easyjet use.  I could tell something was up by the long queue at their desk but as I’d checked in before leaving London didn’t really think about it.  I did notice a flight to Paris was cancelled.  Once through security the airport was largely full of Chelsea fans and it looked like the flights to Luton and Gatwick would almost be operating as charters.  Of course I bumped into more people I know but settled down in a corner to read a bit more of my book.  Then I found out the reason for the queue and cancellation was a French traffic controller strike.  We’d be delayed by an hour as the flights in and out couldn’t fly over French airspace which is a tad inconvenient going from Italy to England.  I then had a long chat with a couple of people I know, it was a bit more setting the world to rights as the one I’ve known longest used to be a civil servant like me before getting redundancy.  Amazing what you can end up talking about on these trips!  I just hope we do enough in the second leg to get more trips this season.  Then again it could be worse we could be on television on a Thursday night in the Europa League.

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