Gratzi, Torino-Prego

Attention Readers: this blog post is a little rant-y and a play-by-play of my whole weekend-sorry it it’s boring!

First off, I want to start this off by saying traveling is seriously the best. It’s the best form of learning about not only yourself but also about cultures, language, food, and other people. I think in one weekend of traveling with two of my friends to Torino, Italy, I learned more than I could have possibly learned in at least two weeks of school.

Italians are not high on my list of likable people right now. It has been quite the weekend! As I’m sure all (the seven of my followers-lolz) of you know, my plans were to go to Rome this past weekend. Well, I’ll tell you right now that did not happen. Me and Lauren and Thea set out on Friday evening to take our train to Rome-little did we know that the universe had other plans. Due to the Italian train workers striking, there were no trains leaving until after 5am on Saturday morning. This would have put us in to Rome at about 4 or 5pm and we would have had to leave Sunday night, so we decided to cancel the trip (so sad!). We sat in the waiting room at the train station and moped around with the homeless people and ate ALL of the snacks we had for the train ride. After we were done wallowing in our sorrows we decided to take action and do something else fun for the weekend! We practically ran home with our adrenaline pumping to plan a new trip! We searched the map and the train schedules and decided Ibizza was too far, Barcelona was too far and Paris was too expensive. We settled (HA-HA) on northern Italy (rough life, I know). We decided we would leave on the 7am train to Torino (home of the 2006 Olympics and the birthplace of Nutella!). Here's me in Torino:

 After a few hours of sleep, I woke early and reevaluated my already packed back pack. I removed my umbrella and searched frantically for my gloves. Running late, I decided I would have to do without my gloves. We walked briskly to the train station and caught our trains just in time! Unfortunately, we got fined for not stamping our ticket. Did anyone mention that we needed to stamp our ticket? The moderator “cut us a break” because we’re foreign. Maybe he should have NOT CHARGED US AT ALL!

The problem with cancelling the Rome trip was that I had already charged all five of our return train tickets to my credit card. When we arrived in Torino we went straight to the tickets office to try to get a refund or a date change for the return tickets. Three of our friends made it to Rome because they left on Thursday night, so ideally we wanted to keep three the same and change two of them for next weekend. The first issue was the guy behind the counter (and apparently everyone else at trenitalia) did not speak ANY language but Italian. We tried English, French, Spanish, and German, but no, the Italians are similar to the Americans in this (rash generalization!).  Luckily for us, he appeared to understand our needs and started printing out three of the tickets. Gazes of horror struck all of our faces as we realized this was the LAST thing we wanted. Because once he printed them out, our friends in Rome could no longer use them, and therefore they were useless and still charged on my credit card. Ugh. Stress. At this point, we’ll call him Andrea, goes to recruit a few other idiots to try to help the situation. One girl who speaks a little French and English starts telling us that it’s impossible that our friends can use those tickets now since they’re in Rome-thank you captain OBVIOUS!

Moral of this rant is that I finally was able to apply for a reimbursement but with the language barrier, I’m unsure if it will go through because they didn’t even have me write down my credit card number. Whatever, 274 euros. It’s no big deal (yes it is).

Anyways, moving on to the more exciting stuff. We leave the trenitalia place and bop around a little bit looking for wi-fi so we can notify our friends that they will need to purchase new tickets, when we realize it’s raining. Remember that little part at the top when I mention I removed my umbrella from my luggage? Yay. So we stayed in the train station and went over to McDonalds to see if they had wi-fi. We were desperate for communication so Lauren went up to this girl with English on her shirt and an American flag hat on and asked her where there was wi-fi. The girl had no idea what Lauren was saying (classic). Luckily we found our way to the tourist information office and literally found our savior of Torino! The lady spoke English and she gave us 2 hostels numbers and a great student friendly guide to the fun stuff to do in Torino. Feeling satisfied, we decided to brave the weather and finally leave the train station to start exploring Torino.

Because of the rain, we opted for finding a place to stay for the night before exploring the city. Mind you, it was only about noon. We walked in to several hotels and walked out rather quickly after hearing the price for a night. As we were getting cold and wet and miserable we saw a sign for a 3 star hotel called Hotel Napoleon. We trudged up the stairs and walked into a charming little lobby with a guy (NAPOLEON!) standing behind the counter who (YAY!) spoke French!!  He gave us a great deal that included wi-fi and breakfast so he showed us to our room where we dropped our stuff and regrouped.

After a snack of bread and cheese, we hit the city.

Because of the rain, we stopped inside little shops to browse and warm up every now and then. In addition, the city of Torino has at least 18km of porticoes which helped us stay dry when we were walking in the main areas.  This is the point where we stopped to have our first cup of Italian coffee (YUM!)

After that we shopped around a little bit where Lauren bought an umbrella (yay Lauren!) Shout out to Lauren for being my personal savior and lending me all her warm clothes because I literally didn’t even bring a sweater.

Our next stop was this rally which frankly we had no idea why they were protesting and I got yelled at in Italian for taking this picture:

Then, unintentionally we found ourselves at the beautiful church where the shroud is held where I WOULD have got yelled at for taking this picture if I wasn’t an undercover spy with great sneaky camera abilities:

We departed from the shroud only to find it was snowing. Big, white, beautiful chunks of snow! After some more walking around in churches and museums we stopped for yet another cup of coffee:

Then we stopped by the store to pick up a few essentials. I bought a big, glass, beautiful bottle of lemoncello for my dad as well as 10 pastries from a vendor (all 3 of us split them-it was 10 pastries for 5 euro).  We started heading back in the general direction of our hotel at about 6pm. We started glancing into restaurants only to notice that for a Saturday night there was NO ONE eating! We were a little alarmed but decided it could be because of the snow. After several minutes of walking in the freezing cold snow, my bag broke and the beautiful (and probably yummy) bottle of lemoncello fell through the bag and CRASHED onto the side walk dousing my boots in lemoncello and glass. What a great day. I was just so lucky!

We made it back to the hotel and covered the radiator in our clothes hoping that they would dry:

We also ate bread and cheese and drank 2 bottles of wine (no disapproving looks-it had been a pretty tiring and stressful day). 

After we finished the bottles, we decided we were ready for dinner (it was about 10:30) and ready to face the world again. We asked Gaspacho (my made up name for the guy working the desk-Napoleon must have been asleep!) for a good pizza place and he had to call his friend who spoke French to tell us how to get there. To our satisfaction (because it was snowing rather hard) it was a one minute walk from the hotel. The place was hopping (Italians eat late-DUH!) and we each ordered our own pizzas, and dang-they were delicious:

We finished at about midnight and took a casual stroll back to the hotel. We were all so exhausted that we laughed at ourselves for the ridiculous day and then passed out!

Lauren’s alarm went off at 6:30 and she informed all of us that we had 10 minutes until we needed to be up (what a joke!). I was just laying there thinking how silly she was to think I was getting up. She woke up ten minutes later and told us all to get up (again-yeah right, not happening!). Luckily for us, she fell asleep (haha) and didn’t wake up until 8:45. We all agreed to get up and get ready. We opened our balcony only to find we had been hit hard with a snowstorm:

Then we enjoyed a yummy breakfast that good ol’ Napoleon made for us! What a good guy!

Summary of Sunday: walk, walk, trudge through snow, brave the cold and remove my hands from my pockets to take pictures, walk, hike up a mountain, go into museums and churches, shiver, get splashed by big bus. Then more coffee: (my first espresso!)

Then we found the Cinema museum housed in the Eiffel tower of Torino. It was actually a very interesting museum and there were so many rooms and so much information and the best part was that it was warm. I got a picture of the actual masks from Star Wars:

SWEET!

Then we caught the train home and arrived back to menton (land of the French-never been so excited!) at about 10:15.

And that was my crazy weekend. I have some pretty negative stereotypes of Italians right now just because the few that I happened to meet were not that friendly or accommodating (besides Napoleon-great!). I’m sure there are plenty of great Italians, but as for now I will keep my prejudices confined to this blog.

High points of the weekend: we learned lots of Italian! We made it a mission to learn phrases and try them out while we were there. If you’re looking to learn Italian, look no further. I will teach you the one and only most important Italian word: PREGO! You can use it in ANY situation. Just bust out your Italian accent and shout it to the world-PREGO!

With that being said,

Bonjourno and prego!