so I went to Turino, Italia this weekend for the Winter Olympics. Totally awesome and since I know I will have to tell this story a million times here is a condensed version so I can at least pretend that it will decrease the number of times I repeat this story.

So we started out on Friday evening at 7. We (Kirsten, Elizabeth, Fran, and I) had to take a train to London, a subway to the bus station, a bus to the airport and then sleep in the airport so we could make our 10am flight. We survived the first night on the tile floor and later some semi-comfortable chairs. We arrived in Italy and took a bus into the town center. We didn't have a place to stay for the night so we wondered around the city, looking at the different plazas. We ran into some Italian guys and then American guys who gave us the idea of going to a pub to get out of the cold for a while. When I walked in to the pub I immediately spotted these two girls wearing Texas A&M shirts. We sat down with them to drink and eat and soon discovered that most people in the bar were in the same predictament as we were, without a place to stay. The rest of the night was amazing. We stayed at the pub till 4am making friends with tons of countries. By the end of the night Kirsten and I were friends with nearly everyone in the bar. Finally the time came to leave our new best friends to catch our train to Milan where we had reserved a hostel. We found some americans that were living in Switzerland that were staying in Milan also and rode with them.
We arrived in Milan at 730am and proceeded to go to our Hostel. Mind you I hadn't had sleep in almost 36 hours at this point. When we got to the hostel they told us that we could not go to our rooms till 11 and that we could not sit in the lobby, we were thrown back out into the streets of Milan. We managed to find a McDonalds, after Kirsten tried to sleep on the floor of the subway station, and realized that the McDonalds didn't open till 9am. We sat outside dead tired, starving, and hung over. Kirsten said it was the worst moment of her life, to which I responded that she must have a great life because we were still in Italy watching the Olympics which was pretty freaking awesome. Finally when they opened the doors we rushed in to discover that they didn't start serving food till 10 and that the only morsel we could have was from the coffee bar which had a selection of croissants. we sat down in teh warm store trying not to pass out and buying random food items so that they wouldn't kick us out. We waited around till right before 11 and went back to the Hostel. Upon our arrival we were told that the first receptionist was wrong, our room would not be ready till 2pm. I think the lady saw the look on our faces and told the maid to please rush our rooms, we were in by 12. We slept away the rest of our stay in Milan and awoke at 1am to catch a train back to Turin, or so we thought.
See Elizabeth had failed to notice that there wasn't an earlier train to Turin because the train station didn't even open till 4am. We were told this little tidbit by our cab driver on the way to the station. so we were forced to sit outside the train station in the early morning hours waiting for it to open. Once the station did open our train sitll wasn't scheduled to leave for another hour and a half so we snuck on and slept in the dark of the train. When we arrived in Italy we had to find the bus to get to the Olympic village, the easiest feat yet, and arrived on time to the curling competition at 9am. Curling was pretty awesome, I have to admit I had never watched the sport before so I was quite intrigued. Afterwards, we had 6 hours till our next even. what we thought was plenty of time.
After we got back to the Olympic village we got on the wrong city bus and ended up an hour later stopped in some random neighborhood as the lone occupants of the bus. After another half hour ride we decided to just get off and find our own way around with the map. we preceeded to get lost though thankfully an english speaking italian noticed our plight and pointed us to a bus stop that would get us to where we needed to go. We decided to split up when we got to the train station so that kirsten and fran could order us some lunch at a nearby pizzeria and elizabeth and I could check into the hostel. When Elizbeth and I got the Hostel we found that the room was meant only for two people and therefore there were only two small (smaller than my university dorm room bed) beds in the room meant for the four of us. At that point, a bed was a bed and we really didn't care anymore. We made it back to the local pizzeria that fran and kirsten were supposed to be at but it was closed because the italians were taking their midday break. we found the two at the pub we had frequented two nights before and we gorged ourselves on pizza, jacket potatoes, and burgers, it was our first real meal since the trip had began.
We made it to skiing, though we barely made it to the train (the doors were closed and we had to convince the conductor to let us on) and that night we pushed the beds together to sleep like only people who have been without proper sleep in so long can.
At this point you might wonder what else could go wrong. well nothing did. we had a wonderful italian meal and toured turin the last day. We made it back to Uni by 1030 that night. With everything that went wrong I have to say that I never felt so alive than this weekend. It will forever stand out as one of the best times of my life.