National Cinema Museum | Parlez Lentement.

A volte devi solo punto. Parte II.

31 03 2011

Alright, sorry for the long absence between Part 1 and Part 2, I’ve been unusually exhausted and busy planning for the rest of our summer and next fall. But I’ll update you on all that later. For now… where did I leave off?

Oh right, architecture.

So after gazing up at the extremely tall buildings long enough to make our necks hurt, we decided it was time to find the museum we were most interested in seeing. We’re lucky it served as a double attraction too! The Mole Antonelliana, one of Torino’s most popular tourist attractions, was the tallest masonry structure in Europe until recent years. Its a very neat looking building, with a large dome like roof. Nowadays, it houses the National Cinema Museum, naturally something my movie-buff boyfriend would enjoy. There’s also an observation deck that you can take a lift to at the top of the building, but we opted not to. Not that we wouldn’t have thoroughly enjoyed the view of the city from its tallest point, but the wait was nearly 3 hours long, and it wasn’t worth wasting our afternoon over. So we settled for just seeing the museum. For general film and cinema fans, we really enjoyed it. The most interesting part of the museum was its archeology of cinema exhibit, which displayed some of the earliest attempts at animation, like Chinese shadow puppets, and hand shadows, all the way through Edison’s Kinetoscope and so on. It was a really interesting place, and served as a break from the sun during the hottest part of the day. That being said though, it was very warm in the museum. I don’t suppose they thought they would need to air condition it.

After the museum, we decided we needed a snack, and decided to walk in the general direction of the Po River, where as expected, there was another piazza. Only this one was filled with one of the most beautiful sights I have ever seen: a chocolate festival. Yes, ladies and gents (especially you ladies), a frickin’ chocolate festival. Why do we not have these in the United States?! Obviously, I couldn’t buy all the chocolate I set my eyes on, but we did find a few things. The candy I decided to try were these little chocolate balls filled with limoncello. I was completely excited about these, given how recently I’ve found out that I like limoncello. I bought ten of them, took the first bite and loved it. Jon took one too and said it was great. The next seven however, were not limoncello. A few of them were amaretto, a flavor Jon and I don’t care too much for, one that Jon got tasted like some sort of spicy olive oil, a few tasted of other liquors that I couldn’t quite put my finger on (these weren’t bad, but they weren’t limoncello either), and then the last one I had, I finally got another limoncello. I was a little (okay very) disappointed, and so we set off to find something for Jon to get. We found a stand that had slabs of chocolate with all sort of things in them, and noticed one with candied orange peels. Yes, please! He got some, and we actually made our little hunk last until the evening, since it was very rich. Obviously, chocolate being as rich as it is, we needed something to drink, and found a little outside bar on the river and had a few bottles of water.

While sipping on our water we were confronted by the unfortunate truth of our exhaustion. At this point, it was four in the afternoon, and we had been doing nothing but walking around in the sun for 6 hours. We contemplated our options and decided to walk back through the piazzas to the Duomo, and then through the shopping districts to our hotel and rest up before dinner that evening. It was either that, or fall asleep before dinner, which we’d been saving our money for all day long so we didn’t want to do that. On our way back through Piazza Castello, we encountered a protest of sorts. I took pictures of the signs and translated them when we got home, and all I can tell is that they’re upset about some sort of cultural ignorance and what not. They were entertaining to say the least, and very loud. After they got a little boring, we headed to the Duomo.

Now, I understand the significance of the Duomo di San Giovanni Battista (St. John the Baptist); its not only the largest church in Torino, but it also houses the ever so confidential Shroud of Turin. It was beautiful, like most large important churches. That being said, Jon and I once again felt underwhelmed. Having seen the Cathedral in Sevilla, Spain (the 3rd largest in the world) , the National Cathedral in Washington DC, and Jon having seen the ceiling height of St. Vitus Cathedral in Prague, I’m confident that I have been spoiled. I don’t think I’ll feel overwhelmed by a Cathedral until I visit the Vatican. Regardless though, it was still beautiful. Next to the Duomo was a little thing that showed an archeological find underneath it, and a little further away in front of the Antiquities Museum, there’s another archeological dig. My goodness, I wonder what’s under Torino.

On our walk back to the hotel, we came across a guy beat-boxing. At first it sounded really annoying, until I realized he was layering each level of the song right there in the street, and once it all came together it made a lot more sense. I bought some freshly popped popcorn and enjoyed the little show. Then we proceed to our hotel, drained from the day and eager for a nap.

Well, the nap didn’t exactly happen, anyone that knows Jon well knows that he can’t even think about shutting his eyes more than a blink without putting a movie on. Unfortunately, it was a great movie, which resulted is no sleep. But at least it could be counted as rest. When the movie was over we freshened up and set out in search of dinner.

Oh, on our way to dinner, we saw a DeLorean. How cool!?

We saw a place the night before that looked promising, due to the fact that it was full of locals, but when we got there we realized it wasn’t really a restaurant, just a bar that served some food. I hadn’t fought my way through the market for a cheap lunch to have bar food for dinner. So we walked down the street a little further and found a nice restaurant on the corner. In Europe, they usually display their menus outside, so we consulted it, noticed it was completely in Italian and basically came to the conclusion that we’ll have that problem everywhere, we may just have to cross our fingers, point, and hope for the best. Well, to our pleasant surprise, when we were handed the menu it had an English version inside. We consulted it, ordered a drink, two courses, and were given a free aperitif on the house. Jon’s first second course choice wasn’t available anymore, so when he was put on the spot to pick something else, he saw a meat with some sort of blueberry sauce, pointed and said I’ll have that. So much for taking advantage of the English menu, because we had no clue what he was getting.

The first course came out, along with our drinks, and we both ordered a cheese gnochi with a Muscato wine reduction. The wine was in a separate little bowl and you dunked each bite in the wine before eating. Best finishing touch ever. We decided we have to try to recreate it when we get home. Our main course came and we realized that Jon ordered something quite delicious. It was a region specific beef, of which the name fails me, but it was extremely tender, and went quite nicely with blueberries. The fact that we were in Italy meant this meal took about three hours, they move very slow there, but not in the “my service really sucks” kind of way. They just enjoy every possible second of life to the fullest, enjoy every last bite and drop of wine like it could be their last, and every conversation as if its the only thing in the world at that moment. Its really a nice way to live, only we were growing more tired by the second. We had planned to take some night photography shots after dinner, but by the time we finally left, all we wanted to do was sleep. We practically had to hold each other up on our walk home, but that didn’t stop us from getting one last thing of gelato for dessert. When we got back to the hotel, we pretty much fell asleep before our heads even hit the pillow.

Our 6:30 alarm came a lot quicker than we’d expected. At the time, we hadn’t realized that it was because Jon’s phone had changed times for Daylights Saving Time, and therefore we lost an hour of our precious sleep. It wasn’t until after we checked out of the hotel and arrived to the train station that we figured this out. However, when we did arrive we were met by the horrors of the Italian train system. Our train’s time had changed by 30 minutes, and not the in the preferred direction. We were supposed to have a 7:30 train out of Torino, but all the boards said 8:00. After doing some mental math and consulting the times we had written down for a second train, we realized that this would get us to our next train station 45 minutes after the train left, because not only was it 30 minutes later, but it was taking a different route, that already took longer. So, not really having many options, we hopped on the train, very tired, very frustrated, and at least I was very worried.

This train wasn’t as comfortable as the last, but it wasn’t awful. I did my best to sleep the whole time, since the grey skies didn’t make for good sightseeing. When we arrived at our next train station, it was raining, and I was worried. After consulting the boards on the platforms, we grew quite frustrated because apparently zero trains go to France, only we knew that couldn’t be the case. Thankfully, while walking to the information desk we saw a screen inside the station with all the French train times. I think the could have at least had this information on the platforms, heaven forbid I had 10 minutes to transfer and missed it because I was looking for the screen to tell me where to go. Well, our next train was about an hour away; we got some pizza, another thing of gelato, and waited ever so impatiently, dozing off every time we sat in one position longer than a few minutes.

I don’t remember much about our last train home, or our walk to our apartment. When we got home, our family greeted us, and Nicolas decided that he was going to bug me endlessly to play with him, despite the fact that he saw me with my hands full. After much frustration trying to figure out what to say to a French 3 year old without upsetting him to the point of screaming, of his parents hating me, I blurted out “Je ne peux pas jouer maintenant, je suis fatiquee!” He proceed to bang on our door for a few minutes, all without his parents caring or noticing. Not exactly my idea of a nice “welcome home”.

All and all, I’d say it was a learning experience. I did enjoy Torino; I think its a beautiful city, the food is wonderful (and cheap!), and if I had the time or money to do any shopping, I definitely had my fair share of options. There’s a lot of history, a lot to see, and a lot of gelato to be eaten. Given that trains will be our main form of transportation for the second part of our trip, I’m not looking forward to getting on another one. I hope every other countries’ train systems are better than Italy’s.

Well, you know what comes next. Pictures!