Monday 6th June: Etihad Brisbane to Abu Dhabi, Alitalia to Milan, train to Turin
Ready for standby business class
The overnight flight into Abu Dhabi is very restful with a 4 course midnight dinner followed by a long dark trip into the night then breakfast before landing at 6am. There's a 3 hour stopover in Abu Dhabi which gives us a chance to have a coffee and a shower in the free showers we discovered in the basement of the airport last time.
The next 7hr leg with Alitalia leaves at 8.45am, and after breakfast and 3 movies, we arrive in Malpensa airport, Milan. There's no such thing as security or customs, and after a cursory check of our passports (no electronic registration of our entry), we waltz through the non-existent customs with our nuts/honey/milk etc, things that would have been confiscated in Oz or NZ.
It's a long walk to the train, and we can only purchase a ticket from Malpensa to Milan Central, not all the way to Turin, as the airport train line is a different company to Trenitalia, the Italian line. Milan Central is chaotic and I have to run through the station, up and down stairs to the even more chaotic ticket office where I purchase 2 tickets on the regional train to Torino. After racing back upstairs, we miss one train by 3 seconds, and have the choice of two others to Turin. Apparently there's 3 types of trains from Milan to Turin. Fast, slow and very slow. We jump on the closest train, which turns out to be the slow train, and 2 hrs later we arrive in Turin, having passed through miles and miles of flat rice paddys, probably arboria rice for their risotto.