Starhotel Majestic Turin

... hoped we were so long as poor pooper could keep going.<br>We counted down as each mile passed, and even as we finally arrived in Turin the little pooper was still pulling like a train (all be it a Hornby one).<br>All we had to do now was negotiate a few more sets if traffic lights and some roundabout's and we would be at our hotel and at the finishing line.<br>Sitting at the traffic lights Kev tossed and toyed with the local boy racers gunning the engine and slipping ...

... christened 'Santa Coq'<br>Gaz didnt notice anything unusual. The towels procured from Ikea were Red White and Blue!<br>First stop Le Spar to re stock with supplies for the jouney ahead - destination Annecy and <br>then onto Chamonix. The drive towards Annecy was fairly uneventful, until we again decided <br>to ignore Dashboard Doris when Charlie 'had a good idea lads' and promptly got us lost!<br>Some time later ...

Again I have a lot to report and hopefully I can get updated to now, but we will see. <br> <br> I am currently in Torino, Italy....<br> <br> Back to Amsterdam: So after that lovely Swedish man informed us of his communist, canabilistic tendencies, we decided to bounce since we still had to kill the entire night and a good chunk of the next day. By this point most things in Amsterdam were beginning to close and I had ingested a bit of alcohol and needed to find a place to ...

After having spent only a week in Italy, a vast country of 30 million people, each with their own individual habits and tendencies, I can hardly claim to be a reliable source of cultural explorative studies. However, I have been observing subtle tendency differences.<br><br>I find most Italians to be gracious to me as a foreigner. They seem happy to use whatever knowledge of the English language they have to assist me. They do not seem to be upset at my ...

... train to Bardonecchia and took a ski lift up, did a little hiking, and lay in the sun in the mountains. We stopped further on the rail line at Oulx and got some beer and food.<br><br>Joel went to Aosta, another mountain town for the day, so now we have two sets of pictures from three gorgeous towns.<br><br>We had a gigantic meal for our last night. I tried ...

... from my room so they could paint it, and we planned for me to sleep one night in one of the boy's rooms so as not to inhale the fumes. All of my clothes and shoes and books and things were piled onto my bed and covered in a protective plastic sheet, and the painters did their job. But what had been a tranquil blue-green on the paint chip turned out to be a rather sickening institutional robin's egg blue, and one night in F--'s little twin bed turned out to be ...

... the palace, and decided to get tickets to the next tour that was at 1. In the meantime we walked around the nearby Piazza Castello which contains the Palazzo Madama, one of the original structures of Torino. Torino was started by Emperor Julius Cesare as he need a place to house his army before the treacherous trek through the Swiss alps on his conquest of Europe. It was picked for its locality to two rivers, the Po and the Dora. In resemblance of military order, the city ...

... I went to two bars at night. I met Ricca's friends who were a bunch of college students. They tried to talk to me in English. They were singing and I recorded that. I had fun. We went to the Red Lion but it was boring. The place was quite characteristic. At 12ish we returned home. Ricca was a little sick. We went straight to bed. <br>

... Madre di Dio, on the <br>east bank of River Po. It's modeled after the Pantheon in Rome. <br>Built in the 19th century... so pretty much like the Rotunda in UVa. It <br>was such a hazy day that we couldn't take a good picture of it. We walked <br>toward the city center, passing many palazzos and strange decorations they put <br>for the interuniversity Olympics ...

... back up that this was true. Also, you are supposed to be able to see the outline of Christ's face in the shroud, as well as the outlines of his body, the places where the nails were placed in his wrists, and a lot of other things. We can't actually see the shroud, but we saw the Concrete tomb where it is held. We got a lot of pamphlets that talk about the holy shrine. Very interesting. Adam turned to me while we were reading it and said "If this doesn't make you believe in God ...