HP6 and Bardonecchia

Before getting to this past weekend's hiking trip, a digression: on Saturday, we went to the movie theater down the street to see the new Harry Potter movie. The movies here aren't that much cheaper than back at home - a full price ticket costs €7.00 ($10.50) and our discounted tickets for being students were €5.00 ($7.50). At least the theater was quite nice, though.

Movies that are released here are dubbed, not subtitled, so we had to try our best to understand what they were saying. Kristen and Fernando had a little bit of an advantage over me by having read the book before, but I think we were able to understand basically what was going on. The dubbing at first was a little weird to me, but I got used to it later on.

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Anyway... I know you're excited to see the pictures from our epic hike in the mountains yesterday. I'll have to hold those off until tomorrow, since it's actually worth doing some show-and-tell about the town at the base of the mountains. Bardonecchia is a somewhat small city at the very northwest of Italy, and is popular as a hiking and skiing resort. While the 2006 Olympics were "held" in Torino, it was actually in Bardonecchia that a good amount of the alpine events took place, since the town is almost completely surrounded by mountains.

As soon as we got out of the train station, we were already in awe. The Alps rise thousands of feet above the city, forming a kind of wall that indicates the Italian-French border.

If you zoom in on this photo (in Italian we would say fare click!), you can see a sign for a store in the center that says "whiskyteca." We got a little kick out of that.

The main street of Bardonecchia is both lively and peaceful at the same time. There are a lot of people, but it definitely has that medium-sized town feeling to it. On this "large" avenue, most people just walk on the street. This is for two main reasons: first, there are not that many cars that pass through, and the ones that do go slowly; second, the sidewalks are so badly designed that it's too much of a hassle to try to walk on them. The sidewalks themselves are actually quite nice, but it looked like each building decided to make its own individual portion of the sidewalk, which resulted in sidewalks of all shapes, sizes, and positions. To follow the sidewalk, you have to zigzag, go up and down stairs, and really use a lot of effort - so you just walk on the flat street instead.

A cute small river flows right by the town, but more importantly for us, this river indicated the bottom of our climb.

After attempts at decoding our map and asking help from locals, we found the beginning of the trail for the mountain we were set on climing - the Punta Melmise. As a sneak preview of tomorrow's post, here is a panorama of the city, taken from a few hundred meters up the mountain.

Much better views to come tomorrow!