Although this blog is a few days delayed, it took awhile to access suitable means to do this. We spent three awesome days in Torin, and I think that it is very safe to say that I walked more in those three days than any other three days in my life.
The marathon began when Stefano picked us up on the morning of Friday, January 14th from our hotel. For those of you who don't know Stefano, he is an acquaintance of Brad, our professor, from a few years ago when he was in Deborah on a Rotary Club Trip. Stefano acted as a volunteer in the 2006 Torin Winter Olympic Games, and when Brad contacted him, he was able to put together a panel of volunteers to talk to us about their experiences with the Games. In order to reach the panel, we first took a very brisk, twenty minute walk across town, possibly exceeding Brad and Craig's racing speed, which according to Aaron, was arm destroying (he was still on crutches from his ACL injury). We finally reached our destination, a non-profit organization dedicated to teaching children to read. They have quite a collection of books, especially Pinocchio, which their collection occupies three shelves. After a brief introduction of the foundation, by the founder's sister, we got into the meat of the presentation. There were four volunteers present from the 2006 Torin Winter Games and they generously shared their experiences and stories. It was quite obvious that they all felt proud to have been part of the 2006 Games, and were honored to talk to us. From their perspective, the Games are probably the best thing to happen to Torin ever. The whole experience opened a lot of locals up to new things. Before the Olympics tourism was essentially non existent, but the Olympics definitely put Torin on the map. After their presentation was over, they again very generously gave us a gift. A calendar that had been made specifically for the foundation. Each student and professor received one, and we could not thank them enough for their kind actions. One of Stefano's friends then took us on another walking venture to get to a bus stop. This bus took us to the Olympic Park. Many of us were amazed at how desolate and barren the park was. Grafitti covered the walls of buildings that many of us have seen on TV only a few short years ago. The administration offices, in addition to media and Olympic Store area was empty, with no signs of life. As we made our way across the park, we found ourselves walking across the famous Olympic bridge under the arch. On the fence of the bridge we saw locks put on by lovers. We walked over to what used to be the old Fiat car factory, which still has the test track on the top of the roof where they used to test the finished product before they would be shipped off. We walked through the old factory which has now been converted into a mall and office spaces, to reach our destination, Eataly, a specialty grocery store for high quality Italian products. This is where the majority of our group enjoyed a delicious lunch. It was personally one of the best pizzas I have ever had (Mane's doesn't even come close). After lunch, we went back to the mall and some of us got gelato, a great way to top off an excellent meal!
We then rushed back to the bus stop, thank god Stefano was taking us because otherwise I don't think we would have been able to find our way on the bus for our next meeting on time.
We then made our way to Deltatre, again after a good amount of walking, but on time. We thanked Stefano and his friend for walking us to the meeting location and then headed into the meeting.
Deltatre was founded in 1986, and essentially provides information technology for sports. This includes many sectors including: websites, video clip links, TV results, graphics, analysis, and records of a variety of sporting events. Deltatre first provided Olympic coverage for NBC's website for the Beijing 2008 Games, worked for Vancouver 2010, and are providing coverage for London 2012. Although a lot of what they talked about was way over most of our heads with exception to a few computer science majors and Brad. It was very interesting and we all learned a lot. Possibly the best part of the presentation was seeing their operations center, where there were easily 100 plus computer monitors in one room. It was empty when we were there, but during the Olympics, one could easily imagine chaos, as the controllers 24/7 all working three monitors. We said our thank yous, and made our way down to the grocery store to wait for Craig who was trying to print our boarding passes. After fifteen minutes, we split into two groups. Bodkin leading one group and a number of people leading the other. Brad assured our group we were not too far from the hotel. After fifteen minutes of walking, we finally were on the street our hotel was on. We then realized we were still fifteen plus blocks away. We started walking about four blocks when Brad saw a bus and decided to ask if it went towards our hotel. We all paused and Brad asks the driver who says yes and Brad is off towards the hotel while our group is left on the street watching him ride away waving towards us. Some of the group decided to wait for the next bus hoping it would take them to the right place, while others decided to walk the remaining distance, ten blocks. Needless to say, everyone was beat when we finally got back and didn't want to do much of anything.
This was just day one of our Torino marathon.
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