Torino

Another blogger beat me to it, but I swear, I was gonna post about Dave Hyde's columns on the Winter Olympics from the moment I read in his column about how countries like Iran marched in the opening to oldschool American Disco (read:funkytown).


Anyways, in a retrospective of looking back, here were some of the good parts:

Gold isn't all that glitters at Olympics

One night, on a media bus, the door opened at a red light and several men got on. One shouted something in a foreign language. The others repeated it loudly.

"We're the happiest fathers in the world," one said in English.

They were Swedish. Their daughters on the Swedish hockey team had just beaten the United States for the first time in 26 games. "He's the goalie's father," one said, and they pointed at a small man, maybe 5-foot-6, whose daughter sparked the win.

"The greatest night of my life," Fleming Martin said.

His eyes teared up. All these fathers' eyes did. You only see these Swedish tears, after an American game, on a media bus, at the Olympics.

Chocolate state of mind

"What's this?" I asked the shopkeeper of Gertosio Cioccolato.

"Chocolate cabbage," she said.

Chocolate cabbage?

"I'll try some," I said.
...

But solid chocolate isn't just Italy's invention. It's Turin's. The first chocolate bar was created here in 1802. And with the Olympics wrapping up, Turin soon will go back to its normal life of driving Fiats, eating pizza (perhaps imported) and eating chocolate. Lots of chocolate.

Every other shop in Turin is a gourmet chocolate shop. And every other shop sells lingerie. How can the two co-exist? Or maybe that's why they do?

Chocolate is so big here they sell something called the Choco-pass in Turin. You pay 15 euro (about $19). You get to walk around town with a map and get treats from up to 23 shops. It's a mixture of Halloween, a scavenger hunt and being Augustus Gloop.