Monday morning

We are about to leave Emans house and head for the Porta nova train station to catch a train to novara. He has great Internet so we can count on checking mail and writing stuff at his apartment, but Internet is supposed to be private and costly at most places so I don't know how access will be once we arrive in Alagna tonight. Yesterday we caught a bus into the city center. It arrived at Porta Susa, a train station and the first thing we did was walk to the other train station Porta nueva. There we had espresso and a croissant and scanned the maps. Then we walked up via Roma to the piazza San Carlo, and took our time observing the atmosphere, which was chilly and gray. We stopped at the Egyptian museum of Turin and got in a huge crowd of Italians enjoying their weekend with some sightseeing. We were pretty tired of walking, but we made our way to the mole antonelliana, the most famous building here. From the lobby you can pay to take an elevator to the top and catch a 360 view of Turin. Afterwards we did some more meandering around and planned on meeting up with Eman for dinner, but we couldn't pass up the chance to eat kebab-pizza, which is what all of the cheap restaurants say, because it's like serving Mexican food and then including hamburger to pacify the natives. Then we met Eman wh took us on his own guided tour and talked about some of the architecture and building restrictions, like you can't destroy a standing building, and if you do build you must first archeologically excavate the site. Then we went to aperretivo, a great tradition that is basically a huge appetizer in the evening. Your supposed to go to dinner still after it, but in typical American fashion we just gorged on the aperetivo, or as we saw it the buffet.