The following day we were headed to the designer outlet centre outside of Milan. Nearly didn't make it as with 7 minutes to spare before our train left, the mother and sister nearly got on to a train to Geneva instead of Genova. Luckily I caught them just in time, not sure ending up in Switzerland was quite what they had planned for the day. The outlet was actually not what I was expecting at all, I thought it would be more like a shopping centre whereas in reality its all outside more like a pedestrianised shopping area in the middle of a car park. It even has several cafes and restaurants so you can really spend the whole day there. Within half an hour we'd already lost our mum, only to have her reappear a couple of hours later armed with several rather large bags. In the meantime Tara and I had browsed the shops, found the Lindt shop and sat in the sun with a gelato.

By the time I got back home I had literally 15 minutes to change and sort myself out before heading out again to go to Cristina's birthday dinner. After getting slightly lost on the way we eventually arrived at the restaurant only to find that despite the fact that we were already half an hour late, her Italian friends were still not there. Oh Italians. They also turned up en masse so there ended up being about 15 of us which was quite crazy. The restaurant was really nice though (if slightly expensive), we must have been there for ages. Afterwards we were taken to a tiny bar/club in Brera which was absolutely packed with Italians going mental. The music was such a bizarre mix of Italian and cheesy English songs, which I'm sure they knew more of the words to than I did. It was fairly entertaining watching an Italianized rendition of YMCA. It was no wonder they were going so crazy considering the strength of the drinks in that bar. Having lived in Europe for a while now I feel like I'm fairly used to how strong their free-poured drinks can be, but I have experienced nothing compared to what I was given in that bar. I genuinely thought she'd pre-mixed the gin and tonic until she handed me a bottle of tonic to go with my already full glass..