Without Reservations_ The Travels of an Independent Woman - Alice Steinbach [75]
What I needed to know was where to catch a bus I’d been told about, one that would take me into Milan for one-third the cost of a taxi. I flipped through the section on travel. The closest thing I could find was A che ora parte il treno? “At what time does the train leave?” It wasn’t perfect but I could work with it. I stopped a man who looked like an airport employee, figuring that I would change the word “train” to “bus” and then ask him to point out the direction. “A che ore parte il bus-o?” I asked, throwing in for good measure the extra Italian-sounding o.
The man in the cap stared at me. For some reason I repeated my question in English, saying “Where is the departing bus, per favore?” He stared again. Then he walked off. Similar inquiries produced similar results. Determined to find my way out of the airport, I moved into a stream of arriving travelers who seemed to know where they were going. I followed them straight to the bus. Their tour bus. Which was headed for Lake Como. I stood there in the rain and watched it pull away.
Buck up, I told myself. If Freya Stark can raft down the Euphrates River at the age of eighty-six, I ought to be able to find my way from the airport into Milan.
And sure enough, just thinking of Freya encouraged me to carry on. A minute later I spotted a taxi and, as though divinely inspired, I opened the door and jumped right in.
The taxi ride from Malpensa to my hotel in Milan took over an hour. Most of that time I’d practiced saying, sotto voce, the Italian words I would need to ask the fare at journey’s end. “Quanto costa, per favore?” I said over and over again. It seemed simple enough. And it was. The driver understood perfectly what I meant and proceeded to answer me in Italian. Naturally I hadn’t a clue as to what he was saying. A porter came to my rescue. “The fare, Signora, is 172,000 lire,” he told me, picking up my bags.
A six-figure fare for a taxi ride! Trying to hide my alarm, I got out my currency converter. It was bad. But not as bad as I thought. Without tip the fare was $95. With tip it came to about twenty dollars less than I was paying for my hotel room. Worth every lire, I thought, just to get out of Malpensa.
I had chosen to stay in a big, modern, chain hotel that catered to foreign businesspeople. Recommended to me by one of the few people I know who’d actually spent a night in Milan—most of my friends cited Milan as a city that was “too industrial, too commercial,” bypassing it for Florence or Venice—the hotel had offered a special promotional rate. I took it immediately, knowing how expensive a city Milan is.
It was busy inside, the lobby buzzing with the voices of men wearing business suits and women in chic outfits speaking the language of business. No tourists here. Although it was not what the French would call a hôtel de charme, I liked the looks of it. For one thing, it seemed exactly like all the chain hotels I’d ever stayed in. And given my language deficits and the fact that Milan was a complete cipher to me, it offered exactly what I needed: familiarity.
That’s when I noticed something unusual taking place in the hotel. Bridal gowns—racks and racks of bouffant white dresses and tulle veils—were being rolled into a large area just inside the entrance. I watched as a small, excitable man speaking in rapid Italian directed the operation. Each time a hotel guest passed by, he gestured dramatically to the racks, saying loudly, first in Italian, then English: “Attenzione! Look out!”
“What’s going on?” I asked a porter standing nearby. He explained they were setting up a bridal trade show, one scheduled to open the next day. I watched a few minutes more, then left for my room. When I stepped off the elevator I walked into a blizzard of white bridal gowns. The doors to almost every room along the corridor