Work trip to Milan, Italy - 3rd to 5th March 2008

A trip to Milan for a couple of days work (and the small matter of watching the AC Milan vs Arsenal game on the Tuesday evening), started with a lovely Monday morning flight out from City airport. I saw Martin Samuel, the chief football correspondent for The Times, in the gate - he was clearly on his way to Milan to report on the game. The flight was OK, if you don't count the fact that the landing was aborted when we were about 30 seconds from landing. The pilot said "technical problems", but there was a KLM plane on the runway at the time, which may (or may not) have explained the issue.

I got the Malpensa Express into the city, and realised that "Express" in Italy means something very different to Northern Europe. The train stopped 3 times on the way to the city, and didn't seem to go much above 40mph. It may be fast by Italian standards, but not really in absolute terms.

During this trip, I was really struck by the complete contrast between the good and the bad of some things in Italy. For many things, like clothes, food, luxury goods, fast cars, and historical venues, they absolutely rule the world - and Italian things are at the pinnacle of the very best you can get. For lots of other things, however, like efficiency, organisation, and most service industries, they are a complete laughing stock - so badly organised and executed that it is almost beyond a joke. I guess you can't have it all (and if the organisation and efficiency is that important, there is a country called "Germany" where you can get it), but the total and utter inefficiency is amusing at times.

In particular, when you check into a hotel, they usually try to keep your passport for a few hours, to "make registration". Does anybody in the EU really still need to do this any more? Maybe there is a special hotel guest registration bureaucracy in Italy that is dedicated to this specific area of expertise. "Make registration" actually merely seems to involve photocopying your passport - then putting the photocopy in your (paper) file about your stay. A complete waste of everybody's time, and seems only to happen to create paper, and a job for somebody.


Anyway, thinking about the good stuff, I had some very nice food whilst there - a pizza where the red stuff on the base actually tasted really strongly of tomatoes, which is a real departure from a lot of the crap you get in the UK. The weather was good and sunny as well, so it made the city look appealing. An interesting trip, although much of the city seemed to shut down in readiness for Arsenal fans arriving - so perhaps not the ideal time to be in town - of course, apart from to watch football.