Parking the Car in Milan

It's too bad we didn't get to the La Scala museum by 5:00. We'd gotten a late start simply because we were having such a good time at Boro and Chichi's apartment. La Scala's ticket booth closes at 5:00, but the museum itself doesn't close until 5:30. We figured we'd get there in time for three of us to jump out and buy the tickets while Boro found a parking space.

We didn't arrive in time. We got there at 5:02. The man at the booth said, "I guess you're just two minutes late, aren't you?" when we tried to convince him that he should sell us four tickets anyway.

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We'd already failed at Plan B, which was to park outside the business district, then take the metro and arrive at 4:45. It's too bad Deborah was snoring in the back seat. She hadn't had a full night's sleep for three days and we thought it would be cruel to wake her up, so we decided to press ahead by car. Unfortunately, the traffic on that Saturday afternoon was nearly as tortured as a trek through a field of hip-deep snow.

Plan C was to simply forget about La Scala and move on to Galleria Vittorio Emanuele, essentially a sprawling mall built around 1890 with towering, monumental arches big enough to hold a dozen dirigibles. First we needed to find a parking space.

The space we found was just big enough for the car to be dropped in by crane. Without a crane handy, Boro, my nephew, handily tippy-tapped his way in, leaving an inch on either end of his car for the other drivers to slip out if needed. He mentioned later, that in Mlian, it's common for drivers to park their cars with the parking brakes off so that people squeezing into impossible spaces can simply budge them, causing not as much damage as they would have otherwise.

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