12-Feb-2006

Oh my pizza! Another fabulous day was had in Torino. We kicked off the morning by going to stand in line to see if we could get some free tickets! The place that we stood in line was right behind the Today Show set up and we happened to see Scott Hamilton being interviewed after he was on the show. I was lucky enough to get my picture taken with him. As I towered over him, I realized how truly tall I was and that I’d probably never be able to do a back flip with my additional 10 inches.

We were standing in line for 2.5 hrs and finally getting to the front of the line I saw that everyone was breaking out their identification. I then realized that I only had the copy of my passport on and now any real documents on me. I didn’t even have my school id. As we got up there, I asked the guy who was letting people in if it would work and he informed me that it wouldn’t. Instead of getting out of line, I just stood there with Al because we heard you could get two tickets per person. So, one of the Italian woman who had been in line with us the whole time started trying to talk to me and she told me that I should use the ID of one of the girls I had been talking to during the wait. These girls were studying in Florence and two of them were standing in line while the other two ran to the train station, but had recently returned. The guard who told me my photocopy wouldn’t work saw me grab the id from the girl and still said that I could go in. It was amazing and I totally loved that Italian woman who had the idea.

Then we had four tickets to the ceremony so we grabbed Jeff and Casey and made our way to the show. There was smaller entertainment so that when people arrived early they didn’t cause a ruckus so we just hung out and listened to the random bands. The place started to fill up and before we knew it we were watching the medals ceremony. I was SO excited when they announced that they would be handing out medals to the Men’s halfpipe! I almost cried. It was crazy to think that just hours before I had seen their runs on TV and now I was standing less than 50 yards away from them. Later I found out that my roommate, Jeff from Reno, had scored reduced price A seat tickets to the competition. He was slightly more fortunate, but only because they were three feet away from the lip of the pipe. Yes, jealousy doesn’t even begin to describe my thoughts on that. But seeing the medals given out was definitely a good time.

Kelly Clarkson then did some performing, which was cool. She was wearing some of the US Olympic garb that we handed out during Team Processing. It was slightly amusing because she didn’t speak a word of Italian and the Italian movie star that introduced her didn’t speak a word of English. Language barriers are amazing.

Well, I’m off to lala land, my legs have been too numb to move on two occasions today and I think they could use a nice sleep time. Ciao!