Louis Vuitton | PintSizedLiving

By the time we arrived in Milano, we were Pizza and Pasta’ed out. We had two goals for the next 24 hours, do some hardcore shopping and stuff our faces with Chinese food.

Our first stop was Xier, a Chinese buffet super center (think two story dim sum sized restaurant) down the street from our hotel. This was the closest feeling to America I’d come to in the last 4 months and it was glorious. Well the food wasn’t that great but there was meat, seafood, gross sushi and it was all you can eat!

After the food, we of course had to do shopping. I left the kids in the hotel with Dad and I headed out with Uncle Bernie and Aunt Yawen. 5 hours, 13 stores and 7.8 miles of walking our shopping was complete (no exaggeration), Aunt Yawen had purchased one Chanel purse and driven the Louis Vuitton sales person to the brink of exhaustion. (She did go back the next day to make a purchase there as well.)

I shopped all day and all I got was a lousy cup of water.

The big purchase of the day.

In all fairness, I did nothing but eat and shop in Milano, but overall it seemed like your typical nondescript metropolitan city. It probably also didn’t help that we had just come from some of the most beautiful Italian cities. We were exhausted and ready to head home.

We headed out for our last meal in Italy that night – Chinese of course. We ended up at this amazing restaurant recommended to us by our hotel staff (based on yelp I think it is called Kam but I’m not 100% sure) . The food was fresh, delicious and authentic. It was here we discovered what the signs at other restaurants saying “no cover charge” meant. Apparently standard practice in Italy is to charge a cover charge per person of 1-3 Euro’s. This is a not a tip, just a flat per person fee. The good news is that we found you need to do absolutely no tipping in Italy.

We were ready to get back home the next morning. What should have been a quick 3.5 hour trip home turned into a very long ordeal that left me confident that we would be only travelling by car in the future. We were supposed to take a train from Milano to Zurich (2 hours 45min), Zurich to Wadenswil (30 min) and then a 2 minute bus ride to our house. This of course included 2 car seats, a stroller, 4 backpacks and two large suitcases (we stocked up on wine, Chinese groceries and olive oil). Apparently there was track work somewhere between Lugano and a town I had never heard of. We had to get off the train from Milan to Zurich, get on a bus, get off the bus and get on another train to Zurich. This of course was in the pouring rain with two sleeping kids.