The Champagne of the Winter Olympics!
“The Champagne of the Winter Olympics” = That’s how they referred to the 4-man bobsledding… I think because it was the last event of the Olympics.
Going to Torino for the Olympics was a really good experience. And I’m so glad that I can say that considering the mixed feelings I felt before we left for the trip. I was definitely excited about the bobsled tickets that we had bought, but I was nervous about the fact that we didn’t have a hostel booked or return train tickets back to Rome. In fact, we weren’t even sure when we were going to come back to Rome… Saturday night, Sunday morning… we had no idea. But everything ended up working out really well.
Jaci, Nikki, and I took a night train leaving just after midnight on Friday night that was fine. Not the most comfortable sleeping situation, but it worked. We arrived in Torino at 8:20 am and we had about three hours to kill before we met up with the three guys Nikki knew coming down from Luxemburg. Torino was considerably colder than Rome, so we headed straight for a café to sit down at and warm up with cappuccinos. Afterwards, we just wandered around aimlessly and looked at all the directions and venues that were set up for the Olympics. We passed the Sponsor Village, which we planned on going into eventually, but the line was always long and we always had someplace to be. When we went back to the train station to meet the boys, we realized that their train had been delayed so we waited in a little pizza place that served Pepsi! Sounds silly to all of you back in the USA, but trust me when I say it isn’t easy to find any Pepsi products in Italy. The guys finally arrived, and we walked around the city for another hour or so with them before getting our train tickets up into the mountains where our event was.
THE ALPS ARE BREATHTAKING. I can’t even describe how gorgeous it was up there. We felt like we were higher than the clouds… and we probably were. It took around two hours to get up to the bobsledding track from Torino because it was so far up. I was looking at the pictures I took of the mountains, and I was disappointed how little justice they give the Alps. Because honestly… WOW. But anyway, we got up there two hours before the event started, as recommended, and had plenty of time to eat, walk around the track, listen to the live music at the stage that was set up, and talk to other American study abroad students that we ran into. It was a really fun atmosphere. There was always really upbeat music being played and they had nearly everyone at the event dancing.
But the coolest thing was watching the bobsledding. I had expected to be a good distance away from the track, but it wasn’t roped off at all. In fact, we could walk right up to the track and touch the ice. I was close enough to touch the bobsled as it whizzed past if I wanted to, but obviously I didn’t because I would have lost a finger… or my entire hand. They went so fast that taking pictures was a huge challenge. For the entire three hour event, we walked all around the track so that we could see the bobsleds racing past from different angles. We walked all the way to the top where the bobsledders started, but you could only get up to see that area if you had the really expensive tickets… which we didn’t have. The five people I was with gave up too quickly and started walking back down the hill while I talked to one of the Olympic volunteers standing guard of the “expensive section.” I reasoned with her and said that I just wanted to see the starting point up close, so she eventually said… “Alright, you can go up here…” I hollered to the others to come, and we all got to go up into the stands and see the beginning of track and watch the bobsleds take off. In fact, I filmed the prep and the take off of the Brazilian team, and they ended up crashing just seconds after I turned my camera off. It was a big deal because crashing a bobsled is extremely dangerous and it doesn’t happen very often. They ended up being okay though.
After the sun went down, it started to get a lot colder. I was wearing my suede sneakers, which got soaked from standing in the snow, and by the 4th Gold medal round my feet were so cold that they were throbbing and I couldn’t feel my toes. We decided to start heading back down to the entrance area so that as soon as everything was over, we could get right on a bus back down to the train station. We were smart to leave when we did because just behind us was such a long line of people that we would have been waiting up in the mountains for at least an hour or two. We decided to try and catch the 10:35 train back to Rome because the next affordable train didn’t leave til 6:30 am… and we were too tired and cold to try to find something to do all night while we waited for it, but we were cutting it close with time. As soon as the train stopped in Torino, we jumped off and started sprinting to the costumer service desk to buy tickets. We really didn’t think we were going to make it in time. But when we told the guy what train we wanted, it wasn’t leaving until 11:05. It must have been delayed or something, but we were thankful for the little bit of extra time. The only problem was that since the train was leaving soon, they couldn’t give us seat reservations, so we just had to hope that we could find empty seats that hadn’t already been reserved for other people… preferably six of them in close vicinity. It wasn’t likely, but we wanted that train so we decided to risk it. Before getting on the train, we went to a grocery store to buy sandwiches and snacks. When we got on the train, there was hardly anyone on it yet since it wasn’t leaving for another 40 minutes. We found an entire cabin (6 seats) that wasn’t reserved, but there was a lady sitting in there already. Nikki politely asked her if she would mind moving to another cabin so the six of us could sit together, and she did so graciously. If you’ve never used the Italian rail system, then you won’t understand how lucky we were… not only to all get seats, but to get all of our seats together. We usually don’t even get to sit together when we make reservations. It was a miracle. Only about 5 minutes after we had sat down, the entire train was bombarded with people trying to get on and find seats. There were so many people in the isleways that they were getting jammed and people couldn’t move. Eventually, a lot of people ended up getting kicked off the train if they didn’t have seat reservations because there just wasn’t enough space. The people who didn’t get kicked off were sitting on luggage, or standing. We just kept telling each other how lucky we were to be sitting all together, because it was a 7 and a half hour train ride and sitting on luggage for that entire time would have been miserable.
We got back to Rome at 6:30 am and we took the subway straight back to our apartments. Even though I had actually gotten some sleep on the train, I crashed until 2:30 in the afternoon.
I had a great time though, and I was so happy that everything went so smoothly. I’ve really lucked out with having such problem-free trips so far. Especially after my roommates, who went to Venice this weekend, missed their flight, nearly got robbed on the train, lost an ATM card, and one of them had accidentally purchased her return ticket for the wrong day and had to pay 55 euro on the spot in order to not get kicked off the train.
Going to the Olympics in Italy is something that I will surely never forget. Maybe I’ll even try to go see an event in Vancouver in 2010. I’ll be 24 by then!
Hugs and Kisses,
Jess
