Italy, part one

So alot has happened since my last post. Sorry to my mother (and anyone else who reads this) for skimping on posting an entry for so long, but October has been one hell of a month, mostly crammed with a midcrit and travel. I'll start with the end of September.

(I'm somewhere in the first two rows of bodies)

I decided it would be cool to go to at least one concert while I was here. I saw one of my favorite bands (Dream Theater) headlining the Progressive Nation Europe Tour at the Berlin Arena. It was an awesome experience, I've never been up front for an entire show (over 5 hours...) but it really was worth the fatigue in my legs for standing up that long. The other bands were good, nothing great but it introduced me to Opeth, which I'd never paid much attention to but I was really impressed by their live performance, you have a new fan! DT played perfect like the insane musicians that they are, I'll see them the next time they come around Boston.

So on to my travels, we have two individual (optional) travels, so for the first one I wanted to experience Northern Italy. My roommate Greg and I decided to head to Milan for the four days.
However, it dawned upon me in my trip research (only two days before we left) that there really wasn't that much to see in Milan. We made a last-minute decision (with the suggestion from our professor) to take a day and a half and travel east and see Venice, with a stop in Bergamo along the way.
Bergamo is an awesome city with an old hill-top medieval town, really good for a four-hour stop if you're headed somewhere else. Its a really steep incline to get up there, you could take a ski-lift if you wanted to, but I'm the 'sportif' type, so walking was a good choice too. We missed the staircase though, and ended up walking along the road to the backside of the hill. Although a lot longer, it was definitely more scenic:
On the way down, since we had time, we took the actual staircase, which was stupidly long. It actually made us grateful for taking the long way up, since it would have been a bitch to go up these:So then we hopped back on the train for three hours and made it to Venice around 6. The light was really nice when we got there, and by the time we made it to Piazza San Marco, night was on setting so I got some good photos. We stayed the night at some tourist campground, which was interesting, and then left the next afternoon. Well worth the trip I think.
So after wards we headed back to Milan to see Internazionale take on Udinese at the famous Italian stadium, the San Siro:Our seats were pretty awesome for 36 euros each, plus I got to play with my ginormous zoom lens. Inter won the match 2-1, scoring the winning goal in injury time, and I've never seen a crowd erupt like they did. On Sunday, we just chilled in the park, getting some work done, saw a Frank Gehry exhibit, and flew back that afternoon. EasyJet is probably the best way to cruise around Europe if you're not carrying much, much recommended.

Wow I forgot how long these things take to write. I'll continue later.