Champagne Problems

So, people from Milan do not sweat.  At all.  It's 35 degrees out and high noon and every Milanese lady is coiffed and perfect in a linen dress and heels, and every Milanese gentleman is walking the street in a suit, or at least dress pants and long sleeved shirts, looking cool and sounding cool speaking Italian into a mobile phone. (Obviously wooing someone, all of them. Even if they are on the phone trying to book a colonoscopy, they make it sound sultry.)

"Have you ever noticed that everyone from Milan is either really hot or really old?" Hannah asks.  Not cold, but old.  And truthfully, I kinda had noticed that.

"No one has any back sweat either," I said, jealously.

"Well one guy had a couple of small spots," she countered, and I foolishly disagreed, which caused a rather furious debate about mens back sweat which I will not go into here, for your sake.  Heat like this makes people dumb.  When I said "Let's cool ourselves off by thinking about cold stuff!" Hannah went first and said "Okay, the airplane from Vancouver was cold," and I countered with the gem  "Yeah," and then that was as far as we could go-- neither of us could come up with anything good like gelato, or cold beer, or stepping outside in the first snowfall of the year.  We just trudged forward, like wartime soldiers in single file, on the shady side of the street, towards home.

At one point we went into a store just because it was air conditioned, and picked up things to try on which we had no intention of buying.  Hannah turned and looked at me and loudly said "Jeez Mum, you look like you've been in a swimming pool."

Aren't teenagers are fun?  "But in a totally sexy way right, Han?"

"Oh my god Mum, just... no."

At least that made her walk away for a second so I could sweat in private.

Fifteen glorious minutes of air conditioning in that store and I still hadn't stopped...er... glowing. But we had to leave since anyway it wasn't getting any cooler outside.  How did we get home?  When we finally did we had to suffer the indignity of sitting on the stairs outside our door while I hunted through my enormous purse for the key, and as I did this Hannah, furious at having to wait even one more minute, looked at me with the disdain one might reserve for someone who has admitted to drowning kittens.  Once inside we knocked each other aside, elbows flying, whipping off shirts and skirts and dresses before the door was even shut, each throwing ourselves in front of a fan dramatically in our skivvies.  Who cares that all the windows and blinds were open?  Screw those perfect Milanese people in the apartments across the way.  They would probably turn away in disgust from our uncouth splayed legs anyway.

The final humiliation was that the cold bottle of prosecco waiting in the fridge had a weird string on the top of it and nothing else.  How do you open that?!  No wire cage or cork sticking out like usual. We felt like cavemen opening the first ever bottle of prosecco, banging it on stuff and scratching our heads and crying before finally just googling it and learning you're meant to open it with a corkscrew.  Crazy Italians.

But then finally, gloriously, this: