Milan and Torino Olympics!

Ok so here is my update from the Olympics and Milan

Milan: Milan was a cool city to be in... for about half a day. The coolest thing they had there was the Ferrari store, which had 5 stories of Ferrari things you could buy. I bought a Ferrari hat (€30,00.... shirts were around €70,00!) They have a huge cathedral there that took 600 years to build - it's enormous on the inside but really I think the Barcelona Cathedral is much better, even though it isn't even done yet. Milan is so expensive... A coke at a Café on the main street runs about €5,50. seriously what is up with that. When we were in Milan our final night, we figured out that it was a law that markets had to close at 10pm, and we couldn't find any beer for card games or anything -- so we went to McDonald's and ordered 10 beers for 4 of us and took them to go. I don't think any of us have ever done that, and I don't think the people at McDonald's ever saw that before either. That's pretty much the highlight of Milan.

Torino: Torino isn't a really good city. In the Summer I think it would be a nice place to walk and see minor tourist attractions. They have the Shroud of Turin there, and Da Vinci's Last Supper, but both of those are by appointment only.. and on two days a week only. Too much work. The Games were really cool. The Canada vs. Czech game was awesome, even though we were in the last row of seats. The stadium was really small so we still actually had good seats. We had some beers and some vodka with a group of about 15 Canadians before we entered the arena, and it really was a fun atmosphere. We brought a €0,74 liter of boxed German wine and got it past security (which was more thorough than an airport). Canada was up 3-0 by the second period I think, and everyone just got really rowdy. The Czechs got 2 goals but Canada ended up winning. After that we all went to a bar and everyone there was practically a Canadian or was rooting for the Canadians. Good atmosphere. Scott, Alex, and I went to another bar after that and then to a club/bar. It was amazing the number of Olympic athletes that were up partying until like 3 in the morning. Germans, Canadians, and a few Americans were there (from what their uniforms and badges said). Scott and I stayed up until 5:30AM or so and went back to the Torino train station to go to sleep. We didn't have any hotel accommodations because it was too expensive for our group. When we got there, the waiting room was practically full. We could barely walk across to the other people in our group and get our sleeping bags. We went outside the waiting room and parked about 30 feet away from it. Woke up at 7 or so to go to the snowboarding the following day. Snowboarding was pretty cool. I haven't seen it before, and Scott ended up getting a sunburn the sky was so clear. We were all sitting there watching the Olympics with t-shirts on. Pretty strange feeling. It turned out that two Swiss brothers brought home their Gold and Silver - and we were OK with that. There was only one American in the competition and a few Canadians. After that, we just bummed around Torino the rest of the day. They have this place called Sponsor Village, where its just a bunch of fun stuff - like 3D movies, free diet coke and you can practice your slap shot or learn how to do curling or go in a snowboard or bobsleigh simulator. The Eurosport people were there with a giant screen, so we sat down and watched the Olympics from there for a few hours. Later that night, we stumbled upon a huge square where Ricky Martin was playing for the Olympics. None of us were too impressed. That night we went to the same bar to watch Canada vs. Russia, but there were Champions League matches going on. After the game ended, they had some live music and about 5 of the American Hockey team showed up at the bar and were hitting on all of the girls. It was pretty funny to watch. Since we were all tired from the night before, we decided to go to sleep at about midnight. We went to the train station, but apparently there was this huge asshole security guard whose job it was to supervise the waiting room. Scott and I sat on our sleeping bags in the corner. The guy game over and said (they wont speak English because they're asses) that we had to sit on chairs. We were like "screw that guy" - and then we went to our place the night before. Then about 30 minutes later some police came over and sort of tap/kicked our feet and told us that we had to either leave or go to the waiting room. So we decided to go to the waiting room. We tried not sitting in chairs again and the guy came over. We tried to sleep in the uncomfortable chairs - didn't really work. About 6 in the morning his shift changed and then we finally tried laying down in the waiting room (this place was really spacious) and it worked.... until 9am. Then the police came and kicked everyone out of it who didn't have a train ticket. We walked around town and went to the city and stuff, and then we went to the finals of the men's freestyle aerials competition. We were on the floor of it where the jumpers stopped and waited for the scores. We practically were on the big screen one out of every three competitors. There were a lot of Americans there and also Canadians. It was an OK competition, but the American got screwed because the judges emphasize doing a perfect landing and how the trick is done, instead of relying on the difficulty of it. Some Chinese guy won it... his difficulty points were like 4 and 4.1... the average for first jump were 4.4 and 4.6.. the American was leading and tried a 4.9 (the highest in the competition) but didn't land perfectly... so he lost. That wasn't cool. Anyways, we boarded our bus to the Oulx train station, then went to Torino, then connected to Milan. We got back in Milan about 1:15 in the morning and went to bed right away. The next day we had all day in Milan - but it was raining and had shitty weather. We didn't do much there. We boarded our plane the next day, arrived, and i had 30 minutes to pack before going to Köln (cologne) with Stuart (from Washington) to visit his former host family and enjoy Fasching. At the Airport we saw about 4 people from the Canadian hockey team... Still not normal for me to see athletes like that eh.

So on to Köln.