TORINO 2006!

Annie and I went to the Olympics in Torino! They were amazing! The whole atmosphere is so cool, just like millions of people from all over meeting and talking and watching amazing athletes. Very cool.

We saw women's moguls on Saturday, February 11th. For the qualification round, we were kind of down below the slope and could see the bottom pretty well, but not the top.




So we had a great view of the 2nd jump, which was awesome, because they do some majorly awesome tricks off of those. The qualifiers ended around 4, and then the finals weren't until 7, but you weren't allowed to leave the venue, for security reasons, I guess. So everyone (except the people with the special press or sponsor passes) crowded into this majorly too small food tent. But it was heated! So we all crowded together and made nice. We met tons of other Americans, a lot of them students who are studying abroad in Europe like us, but also real people too. Like this one guy whose whole family was there, and he had been to every Winter Olympics since Sarajevo in 1980 (right?), and even brought his 8 month old son to Nagano in '98. We thought that was slightly excessive. I can't even imagine the money that would go into a trip to the Olympics like that. They were staying for ALL 3 WEEKS, and going to countless events, and paying like, 10 euros for a meager piece of lasagna in the food tents. Not to mention flights and hotels. CRAZY. Then we went back outside for the finals, and went off to the side of the slope, and also higher up, so we had a great view of the whole run. A Canadian ended up winning, a Norwegian in 2nd place, and a French girl in 3rd place. Yay!

(la piste all lit up at night for the finals!)

After the event ended around 8pm, we all stampeded to the buses. Annie and I managed not to die, and made it back down to the train station at Oulx to catch a train back into Torino. On the train we met two NBC guys from New Jersey and North Carolina who were in Turin for 4 weeks to cover the Olympic Games. What a cool job! And speaking of cool, we also met a bunch of college students who were doing a 5 week internship with NBC and were helping out at the games. I want that gig immediately. Back in Torino, we met up with Christine and Trevor (two friends of Jason's who were also going to the Olympics the same day as us!), and together we ate amazing pizza (probably best I've ever had), went to an Italian bar where we were given free wine, wandered around Torino at all hours of the morning, went to the "Texas Ranger" bar, where we ordered amazing greasy food at 4 in the morning. Then we headed back to the train station and slept in uncomfortable chairs. Trevor snored. And then Annie's wallet got stolen, which sort of put a damper on things. So we ran around the train station for a while, filing police reports, trying to communicate in whatever language we could, and making necessary phone calls to cancel her credit cards.

Nevertheless, we perservered and managed to survive the next 12 hours until we got back to Toulouse! From Torino, we thought we had train tickets (we must have been fooled by the fact that we bought them at a TRAIN station and they said TRAIN on them) and actually ended up taking a bus to Lyon. In the bus' defense, it was a very nice bus and they showed the movie "Ray", of which I watched none at all because I passed out for all 3 hours to Lyon. Then we waited an hour in Lyon and finally get back into Toulouse at 10 pm Sunday night. It was sure a whirlwind trip, but worthwhile nonetheless! Now we have total bragging rights: WE WENT TO THE OLYMPICS!

^(moon over Torino)

Super Bowl, France style!

Well, it was actually half France-style, half American-style (with some United Kingdom thrown in there...very international). De Danu is an Irish pub right near my house, and this France/Etats-Unis group organized a little American fiesta to watch the Super Bowl! They had Budweiser and this guy made some amaaaaazing chili. It was all very American and loud and smoky. Not that I've ever actually watched the Super Bowl in a bar before...but I'm assuming it would be something like this. ;-) There was a French football (as in, American football) team there too, and they were more into the game than the Americans! Unfortunately, it was televised on a British sports channel, so there were no good commercials and the announcers really sucked at talking about football (ie. calling a "tackle" something ridiculous like a "conflict"), so it was not exactly like in the US, but it was good enough. And then Michael and I got these ridiculous looking hats with no brims for free. We obviously wore them. There was even one of those little baseball cap holes in the back for my ponytail, how convenient!

Unfortunately, I could not even stay up past the half time show (mind you, the super bowl didn't even start until midnight here, so we're talking around 2:30 am, not tooo bad), so I had to find out online who won the next day! Not that I even cared at all. :-)

bisous! <3