travels of a wandering canadian

Torino part 1

so i'm in berling right now for about a day and a half, it's been really great and will try to write about that a little bit later.
so everyone has heard about torino and the winter olympics in 2006. it's a great place to visit cause everything is close to the center and you can walk almost eveywhere and if you get lost, chances are that there is a tourist info booth within sight.
so i go there in the afternoon on june 1st from lyon and was met by morgan, a friend from high school in edmonton, who was there on a CS conference. he had along with him two friends also from edmonton, so the 4 of us hung around that city for the rest of the day.
first stop was the hostel cause my bag is a bit heavy to lug around town. we tried to find lunch cause we were all pretty hungry and instead came across canada house from the olympics. you would think it would be easy to recognize, a log cabin in the middle of an italian town, but since none of the albertans believed me, i asked the parking attendent for the parking lot that is right below the house if it truely was canada house during the olympics. and it was so we got a photo of the canadians in front of canada house.
we found some food and then went looking for the egyptian museum, apparently the largest museum of its type outside of egypt. we got a bit lost, came across lagrange street, of calculus fame (the guy was born in torino), and eventually wandered into a back entrance to what we figured would be the musuem. it turned out to be the museum as there was a large room with a bunch of egyptian statues. the place was huge and even had a copy of the rosetta stone(it allowed ppl to understand the egyptian hieroglyphs, original in london). as we were leaving, we figured out that we had entered to museum through the back door and saw the place for free. the ticket counter was off to the side and we had avoided the beginning of the museum where they did the ticket check.
afterwards we went for gelato, the ice cream in italy is amazing! we walked to the top of a hill and got a great view of torino. the mountains are gorgeous, they totally encircle the place. we then slowly headed to the restaurant where the conference banquet was to be held and i got in for a small fee. italian food is also really good. there were so many courses that i couldn't eat most of the meal. unfortunately, due to the hostel curfew, i skipped dessert and headed back to the hostel for the night.
the next morning, i ended up talking to some girls in the room, one was canadian and had a mountain equipment coop bag, that was how i had recognised that she waas from canada and the other was from germany. since there was no more room in the hostel, the german girl and i move to small hotel in the middle of town. the place was almost empty which was great! in the afternoon we all caught a train to savona, the nearest beach to torino (2 hours away) and had a nice afternoon just lying around. so after swimming in the atlantic, a week later i was in the mediterranean. the water was so clear and a bit cold, but you could just float there! we slowly headed back to the train station and saw that there was a train leaving in 5 minutes so we rushed to the train. it was firday and a holiday in italy so we were the only ones with the brillian idea to go to the beach that day. the train was packed! we sat on the floor b/w the two wagons for half the journey before there were some free seats. once we got back to torino, we went for some food at a local restaurant and again had some great italian food, pasta in the form of chick peas with a shrimp sauce. so more about torino eventually as i spent another 2 days there.

posted by madeleine @ 9:15 AM