Skip to main content

Torino

On an unseasonably warm weekend in late January, Jenna and I ventured off to Torino, Italy. It might sound familiar as the host city of the 2006 olympics, although you would've heard of it as Turin because we're Americans and we don't pronounce things the way they're supposed to be pronounced.

For some details on the trip and the impressions of Torino, I'll direct you here. It's a 7-things-you-should-know article I wrote over on Robot Butt, which is also a ridiculous site you should check out.

So here I'll put a few things and a few photos.

Torino has a few big attractions, including a museum of cinema, an Egyptian museum, and a mind-blowing landscape, but they have a ton of smaller attractions too. The Egyptian museum, from our experience, was a complete dud. Most of it was under construction and the stuff that was available was nothing to write home about. Apparently we're in the minority in that opinion because it's wildly popular on sites like Tripadvisor.

We opted for views and chocolate.


That tall building is the cinema museum and it's actually really cool. There's something like a Wonka-vator in the building - you go up in a glass elevator in the middle of a conical dome where the only thing around you is nothing. It's awesome.

While we were up at this lookout point we happened across a pair of guys from Cincinnati. Small world. There's a rebuilt medieval village in Torino and it's pretty OK. It was very uncrowded when we went, but it looks nice from the outside. Evidence below.


The city was just really pleasant. Cheap gelato, incredible chocolate, stores, piazzas for sitting, nice buildings, a river, and great views galore. As I mentioned over on RB though, there isn't really a "one thing" that the city is known for, which is kind of a shame.

 Royal Palace

 Another view of mountains

 View of a main street from a church

Sunset and birds. Two things that only exist in Italy

And the most important thing I can possibly mention is that Torino taught us that hot chocolate in Italy is hot chocolate. Not hot chocolate-flavored drink, but chocolate, melted and half-drinkable. It's served with a spoon and it's the finest thing I've ever had. We spent as much on chocolate as we did on actual meals.

Italy has its merits.

Next trip was a really big one...Rome.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

How do you pick a place?

Traveling is good. Traveling does things to you that staying in one place cannot. But traveling poses one of the most difficult questions that a person can be faced with: Where do you want to go? Most people have a list of places that they'd like to go. Depending on your station in life, that list might include Paris, Tokyo, Disney World, Bora Bora, or Branson, Missouri - all of which are fine choices, if given the right set of circumstances. But that list is probably longer than one place, and you're almost certainly not spending an unlimited amount of time in whichever place you choose, so how you do decide where to go and what to do while you're there? The truth is that it's hard. I'm lucky, I know it. I've been a lot of places - more places than were originally on my "I have to go there before I die" list, if I'm being honest. And yet, I still want to go places. Every time one place gets crossed off the list, another place gets added. Wh...

Hyraxes and Elephants and Africa

Sometimes you read things online that can't be true. Sometimes those things turn out to be true. About a year ago I read that the hyrax is the closest living relative to the elephant. The hyrax is roughly the size of a domesticated rabbit - maybe smaller - and looks like a mix between a capybara and a rat. Here is its wiki page . It's amazing. The genetic similarities (if you don't read the wiki page) are because they have similar testicle situations (great band name), their mammaries are patterned in a way that's similar to manatees and elephants, and their "tusks" come from the incisors (same as elephants) whereas almost all animals have "tusks" from their canine teeth. How can something that maxes out at about 10 pounds be nearest relative to something that weighs about 200 pounds at birth? Science is amazing. And while I do want to explore how the above question can be answered, I'll do that on my own time or read about it on the intern...

Valentine's Day

Jenna had the idea that we should go to Verona for Valentine's day of our year abroad. Thanks to Romeo & Juliet, Verona claims to be the city of love and pulls out all the stops to make Valentine's day extra special despite the fact that Shakespeare had never been there and Juliet's balcony is a sham. In any case, this was our third stop in Verona but this one was on a mission. The city hosts something called "Verona in Love." They basically set up chocolate stands everywhere and put hearts on almost anything in the city that draws people. This is great if you like chocolate and even better if you know, unequivocally, that chocolate is the best thing in the world. We fall into the 2nd category. There's more than just chocolate though: They have photo-ops, rose gardens, markets, entertainers, and much more. A walk through the city is somehow even more alive on Valentine's day than it is on any other day, which is an accomplishment. There's ...