Day 2 in Milan-Verbania

This morning we woke up to this.

So it was a pretty exciting awakening, I must say.

Me and M slept upstairs tonight, while F and Ila slept in F's room, on the ground floor. When I woke up M was already gone downstairs, so I went downstairs too. F was not at home because he had to go with his father somewhere, so it was me, M and Ila. We needed to have breakfast, so the first thing we did was trying to figure out where the biscuits and all the necessary things were. We sorted everything out. Then we wanted to make coffee so we turned the coffee machine on. The thing is, neither me or any of the others knew how to make it work. After a while we gave up, knowing that we had failed. We just had milk and ate biscuits.

Then F came back home and since it was 1 p.m. we decided to go eating somewhere. We ended up at a Chinese/Japanese restaurant in Verbania. It was the first time that I went to an all-you-can-eat restaurant. We ate a lot and the price was pretty fair.  

After that we decided to go around Verbania city centre to just have a walk. It took us less than half an hour to see everything. In fact, it's quite small. You may not know it, but I love small cities and towns. Compared to big cities or metropolis, small cities are more welcoming, less chaotic, everything is more likely to function properly, and most of all they don't stress me out. Moreover, if you want to go somewhere you can go walking and I love it. 

As I was saying, we went around the city centre. It was all lighted up with Christmas lights! I loved it. Here are some of the pictures I took.

I love them, they look so happy!

After that we went to a supermarket called Esselunga di Verbania to buy some food and beverages for that night's party. We bought wine, vodka, beer, crisps, beer pong glasses, dishes and napkins. There were a lot of coloured Christmas-ish decorations and I wanted to buy some, but my friends told me it wasn't a great idea so I gave up.

Then we went back to F's house to take all the stuff we needed for the party and dress up a little bit. The party was host at the "Circolo degli alpini di Verbania", that was something like 100 metres away from F's house. The place was a kind of shelter in the mountains. It was a giant room with wooden furniture and a hearth - thank goodness, because otherwise it would have been extremely cold. It had another floor downstairs which was made of a giant kitchen, a bathroom and a storage room. I think it had an additional floor upstairs but we could not go and check anyway. 

Talking about the party, it was not the kind of event where people danced, it was more like a grown-ups meeting. We had dinner, then toasted to F's birthday and graduation, while there was music in the background - we had chosen it previously. At some point somebody decided it was time for beer pong. Since the players were terrible at throwing the ping pong ball inside the beer glasses, the matches lasted more than one hour each. Due to this, only two matches took place. At the end of the beer pong F opened his presents. We gave him a card that stated "Happy birthday and congratulations to The King" - since during the Erasmus exchange he claimed he was the king of Verbania several times - and a wig. He loved it. But that was actually the "fake gift". In fact, later on we gave him the real present and he was happy to find out that it was exactly the coat he wanted - we had seen him trying it on months before.

Then we realised it was 3 a.m. and everybody was super tired, so we decided it was time to go home. I actually don't remember everything about that particular moment of the night, but I do remember that I was extremely cold. As we got home I kind of jumped onto the bed ad fell asleep immediately. It had been a full day.

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