Monday

Monday morning in Turin. Rainy day here.

Very nice breakfast at the hotel. Not the best coffee, but a wide selection of breads, fruits, cereal, and even some hot dishes of eggs and bacon. Supposedly, it's included in the room charge. We'll see at check out time.

We took a bus from the street by the hotel to the main downtown area, but we still don't have our sense of direction. The first destimation, the visitor's center, was seriously closed once we found it. We then headed back to the main area and stumbled across what is now the visitor's center (just a corner office in a business building). They were helpful.

I call some of what I see here "Olympics Hangover". I'm sure that they built up a lot of stuff for the Games and, like most Olympic host cities, have struggled to make use of the resources mustered for those two weeks. Looks like a fair amount of "fringe" type characters wandering the streets. Many solicitations from random people this AM.

Turin has old buildings, but it has less of the Roman city influence. The streets seem more right-angled, although there are plenty of odd-angled ones here in city-center. The guidebooks refer to this as an industrial region. You can see the Alps in the distance (when it's not raining).

We'll try to find a bike today as I plan to ride the next three days.

The hotel caters to the business set. They had multiple copies of several newspapers for reading at breakfast, including The Daily Telegraph (the international version of The Grey Lady). It was good to read paper, even if it was the NYT.

All for mow. For those of you reading this as you get to work Monday, consider that I got up about the time you may have gone to bed!

Have a great week.

BCOT