Asbury College at the Olympics

It’s 8:15pm on Monday, the one-day weekend for the production crew at Pragelato Plan. While I didn’t get to fulfill my original plans of skiing in the Alps today, I had a very restful and recuperative time. Yesterday we got off of work around 4:00pm, which gave me plenty of time to plan my time off. Because I couldn’t find anybody else who wanted to go skiing, and I was feeling a little too tired to organize the whole trip, I decided to call off those plans.

Of the four other students at my housing, two were sick, so they didn’t want to do anything last night. Everybody else planned to go to Torino today, which didn’t really appeal to me as a day-off kind of activity. I sent Tyler an e-mail, to see if he or any of the other students at Cesana were doing anything. Nobody had the day off, but he was as bored and as tired of being stuck as I was, so I decided to head out to his venue to spend the night. The adventurous part of it was that last night brought the biggest blizzard since I’ve been here, so the one-hour bus ride stretched into 2.5 hours, since the bus could only take the 180 degree turns so fast. The chains on the tires didn’t help either.

I had a good conversation with a writer for the Associated Press, who is based in Tokyo, but grew up in Vancouver. Plus, with each mile that was placed between me and the temporary housing, I felt better and better. I didn’t get to Cesana until about 8:30pm, and my first mission was to get some dinner. Dinner in Italy is much later, no restaurants open until at least 6:00, and it’s closer to 7:30 for most of them. I like this, because I usually eat a lot for lunch, and it prevents midnight hunger.

Cesana is a great little town, with a really nice main street that is blocked to traffic. The only problem was wading though 1.5 feet of snow. I found a nice pizzeria, and ordered a more-than-large-enough pizza for 4.50 euro. Thanks to good timing, and the magic of Blackberries (the phones not the fruit), I stepped outside just as Tyler was walking back from work. We walked back to the temporary housing where I ate my pizza and caught up with several other Asbury students. It was a great evening hearing everybody’s stories, and like the good ol’ days (of three months ago), Tyler and I were the last ones to sleep, talking business plans and summer adventures.

Taylor Vinson is lucky enough to have a triple room with no roommates, and kind enough to share it for the night. The funny part is that since it’s the same prefab as my hotel, I slept in the same bed, and everything looked identical. As I set my alarm, I laughed at how disoriented I would be when I woke up.

In an effort to maintain my good health, I got a good nine hours of sleep. A lazy 10:30am breakfast let me meet some of Tyler’s coworkers, as well as a few other Asbury kids. Tyler left for work, and I headed out to explore some more of Cesana by daylight. Turning down a side street, I walked about a mile, and found my way to a quiet country environment, where dogs sat outside of front doors and retired couples sat in chairs on snowbanks, reading the newspaper underneath the huge Alps in front of them. The mountain scenery here was some of the most beautiful I’ve seen this trip, especially because of the last night’s snowfall.

After taking plenty of pictures, but knowing they weren’t capturing a tenth of what I was seeing, I made my way back the Cesana bus stop. At the same little crepe store where I had eaten a few weeks ago, I got a delicious latte macchiato. My high expectations of Italian coffee have all been met, and I’m trying to sample as many varieties as possible. A latte macchiato is a tall cup of steamed, frothy milk, to which a shot of espresso is added, not to be confused with a cafe macchiato, a shot of espresso with a few drops of cream.. It was delicious, possibly my favorite variety so far. It was great because the milk is so rich, that along with my breakfast, it got me to an 8:00 dinner.

I took the bus to Sestriere, where I did some souvenir shopping, but I still really don’t enjoy that town. After Sestriere, it was a bus to Pragelato, but I took the stop about 5 miles before the temporary housing, and looked around at the hundreds of booths which were selling all kinds of local foods, all of which could be sampled. I had a five-minute conversation with an only-Italian speaker at a little (one-room) grocery store to try to figure out which product would fix my dry face. I finally decoded viso, corpo and mano as face, body and hands. A few weeks of sincere effort, and I really think I could learn the language.

I got back to the hotel around 4:30, finding an empty hall; the Asbury kids must have gone to Torino. Unfortunately, several minutes of digging through my backpack resulted in no room key. Fortunately, I walked onto the hall as the cleaning service was leaving, and they never bothered to make sure I was the actual owner of the room.

Again I hesitate to write this paragraph, but I need to stay honest. The bus that I’m currently writing on is going back to Pragelato, from Pinerolo. Yes, home of the my guilty Italy pleasure, McDonald’s. Fortunately this time was a much less eventful trip; as insane and unreliable as the bus system is, once you figure it out and learn how to enjoy waiting, it really is pretty fun.

The high point of the trip to Pinerolo was when an American family got on the almost-full bus while we were still about a half-hour away. After the thirty-minute din of a dozen Italian conversations, the excited voice of a six-year-old American boy snapped me out of my crowded-bus cocoon. For the rest of the trip, I listened to him sitting three seats back, telling his dad several stories, which he swore really happened. I heard tales of him driving a car at two hundred million miles per hour and slamming into police cars and then his car transformed into an airplane with a rocket engine that burned up the cars chasing him and then it turned into a needle and then a dune buggy across the whole desert.

That was my very relaxing 1.5 day weekend; I’m now lying on my bed and it’s 10:00pm. Even though work doesn’t start until 9:45 tomorrow, I heard at least four people coughing on the bus, and I just finished my last orange juice, so I may get some extra sleep to stay healthy. I miss you all, and I can’t wait until I can talk about these adventures in person… preferably over a latte macchiato.