To our regular listeners hoping we are finding you all jolly fantastic! to our newcomers...welcome:D

Today we left the wondeful world of bern for milan...we liked bern:) it was all ye olde worldy, and we even managed to rent out bikes for free after much confusion with the bike rental man whos english skills went as far as "i dont speak english" and...well we dont even know what language the people of switzerland spoke so it was all very complicated. But with our new sherrards skills we managed to get ourselves free bikes for 4 hours hurrayy (mels been wanting to have a go on a bike since we got here so she was delighted to say the least) So we mounted our noble steeds and off we went cycling like the clappers...we decided we would just cycle on the road and see if it lead us to anything of interesante as we had a distinct lack of map and no idea what there was too look at in bern...i managed to take us up all the hills in bern and we didnt seem to stumble across ANY sights...so after an hour of cycling round in circles we decided that we had completed a years worth of exercise and we took them back. It was fun. Although i am in a considerable amount of pain today...

We then decided it was a necessity to purchance a swiss army knife each (we were in switzerland after all) mels has many contraptions on hers including a tin opener whihc we used to open our beans...and mine is just cool. (to pauline and glyn i don't plan on actually using my knife after the last incident when i nearly decapitated my thumb)

This morning we were awoken by the wonderful(not) sounds of bells ringing at half 6 whihc i swear went on for half an hour...we were not impressed to say the least...some of our room mates then felt the need to pack up and leave at 7 whihc involved one of them brushing their teeth for about 6 hours.

We managed to check out for 10 (quite reasonable) afetr yes you guessed it nutella on toast...mel got cereal from the vending machine tho woopwoop. And we went on a mission to find the train station. This involved a stop at the supermarket where yesterday we found the nuts :D:D i got four bags (how embarasing)...just in case we dont find them again...

we then had a minor disastor trying to find the train staion...which we had stupidly decided to walk to (with big rucksacks) 40 minutes later we wondered why we didnt just get the bus...but we found it and were disgruntled to see that there didnt appear to be a 12.07 train to milan. With nobody to ask, we figured the best appproach wuld be to get the train to zurich (an hour in the wrong direction) to get the train to milan from there...it worked...just added 2 hours on to the time sat on a train...

we happily found some seats, and the window had an electric blind...which provided much entertainment cos we both had buttons to work it, THEN about 3 hours into our train journey as we were gabbing away some psychotinc forein woman who was sat behind us came over to our table, grabbed my phone and threw it (with considerable force mind) onto the floor...as we looked on in horror...she then sat back down and continued to read her paper as if nothing had happened. Well you can imagine our response...after the original horror of what had just happened we found it rather entertaining to say the least...my fone appears to have survived its attempted murder altho two of the buttons are now missing *sob*

We arrived in Milan with the directions to get to our hostel of 'very close to the central station and 3 metro lines' . we had an adress, so after much faffing we managed to find a help desk. The nice man gave us a street name to find...which we forgot...so mel whipped out the europe book we found in the hostel in paris, and we walked down the street that the road to our hostel was suposed to be off. Well. it appeared after about 4 hours that 'viva lanzerotto' street didnt exist and it was not close to the central station whatsoever. Italy street names are gay. The road we needed was infact called something different and after communication problems with the woman in the pharmacy she pointed us in the right direction (a road we had walked past 20 minutes before) and we found 'hotel arno'. we were then faced with about 4 hundered million stairs but were greeted by a funny italian man and to us the equivalant of a 5 star hotel. We each have CLEAN towels, there is a FAN in our room, and a WARDROBE and even a T.V. We are in some form of luxery. we dont even have to share with people:D:D

We like hotel arno.

we shall be visiting the sights that milan has to offer tomoroow. If anyones in milan, you'll find us in Channel and those other posh shops...fashion capital of the world...we'll fit right in !!

much loves and we'll be seeing you all VERY soon

xxxxxxx