HighlightMode since I’ve been blogging the heck out of the holes in my last days at Culmann!

Overall an excellent day! Woke up a bit groggily. At breakfast a friendly Ukrainian guy, Adam, introduced himself to me. We decided to check out the city together.

We took a long walk into the downtown, and hit it off really quickly. We started off talking about our homes and families, then moved to politics. He was naturally really into Ukrainian politics and was absolutely shocked when I said American politics was bad. “You have no idea.” was his general response. Starting from how one gets a driver’s license, he exposed just how broken and corrupt the Ukrainian regime was, how unstable the borders were, how the pressure from the West, in his opinion, was helpful but not sufficient, and so on. It was very interesting.

We checked out a really cool fortress, the Sforzesco castle, which used to be the province of the Duke of Milan. It had several progressively smaller courtyards and fallback defensive setups. And the walls were riddled with arrow-holes. It would have been a scary place to attack. Photos in the gallery!

The fortress adjoined an awesome park :D We walked from one end to the other chucking the frisbee and found ourselves by a large stone gate.

Then we went to the great Duomo cathedral. The outside was magnificent and the huge bronze gates were so intricately detailed, we could hardly believe it! At a few places the verdigris on the gates had worn to reveal the gold bronze–we thought maybe people kissed the gates, but then realized much of the wear was on the leg of one of the Romans beating Christ as he carried the cross–why would pilgrims kiss that part of the gate? Nearby there was a famous indoor walkway, the Galleria, which was actually stunningly beautiful. Tried, with limited success, to get Adam the stoic Ukrainian to take a goofy pose in some of the pictures.

Next we hit an awesome pizza place, Pizza Am, recommended by my QIT friend. The place was packed, but they gave us free pizza and wine while we were waiting. Everyone greeted us with a friendly “Ciao!”. The pizza was charred, chewy and amazing, with big cloves of nearly uncooked garlic, mmmm (See?! See?!? It’s yallbois back in the states that are the Philistines, not me!) After the pizza they brought free shots of limoncello, which, ever since I tasted it in Spain at my high school graduation trip, has been basically my favorite thing ever. Still amazing.

We walked back to the Hostel Colours chatting all the way. There, we settled down to work. I wrote a lot of backlogs. After several hours of this, we went out for dinner ;) We took the metro to another place my friend recommended for a buffet dinner. It was pretty tasty, but not quite as mindblowing as the pizza. We got each a cocktail and all-you-can eat for 11 Euro. We got fairly deep into political dilemmas. Adam really wanted to help the situation, to earn a lot of money and fund free-press groups and so on. I thought to introduce him to Eric Erkela, our political enthusiast / free speech champion back home. He said sometimes he felt burdened with his desire to help his country; I said he was fortunate to have the meaning it gave. The talk turned to my fundamental motivations and inclinations, to utilitarianism and its appeal and drawbacks, to my current chill, comfortable-but-globally-uncertain stance on everything.

We hopped the Metro back and got into political Archipelago theory and even the possibility of living in virtual reality. That was a good end point. We said goodbye and he headed upstairs to sleep and to make an early morning meeting at his exchange university here.

I went upstairs, where, after a little conversation, I was invited for a glass of wine by an Iranian dude at random. The fellow poured me one from his bottle and we chatted about his stone-trading business, the fact that he has to get a computer science PhD to give his parents lasting happiness but he doesn’t like computer science, his complicated romantic relationships that foundered on the rocks of travel… it was very interesting. I thanked the fellow (Hossein), washed his glass, and went to write more backlogs and this log. It is now 2am and I want to make the breakfast at 9am and I’m utterly exhausted. Cheerio y’all!