Turin; Friday, 24 September, 2010

At one point it had looked like I might have a very long delay to my flight. The French air-traffic controllers had gone out on strike (again) and a lot of flights were up with 2 or 3 hour delays. Thankfully, for some reason that we weren’t aware of, the Pilot on our flight had managed to get us re-routed, via a slightly longer course over Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany and Switzerland down into Italy, thus avoiding all French air space, and only adding 10 minutes to the flight time. On top of that, he managed to get us off the stand fast-ish, and whilst the planes around us were settling in for their two hour wait on the tarmac, we, just 30 minutes late, were on our takeoff roll.

The flight was even less time than expected, and rather than being quite late we ended up landing only 10 minutes behind our scheduled time. With a quick run through the airport, collecting a Torino card on the way, I made the train into town with a few minutes to spare that I would have caught if we had been on time.

At present the trains from the airport don’t go all the way into the city centre because of major works on the railway lines (so major that they don’t actually exist at present!), instead they terminate at a station on the outskirts of the city centre, Dora. Thankfully, given the weather was starting to look threatening; Dora is just a couple of hundred meters from my hotel, so it was a very quick walk from the station to the lobby.

I checked in and took my stuff up to my room, I was about to head out when the first heavy shower passed through. After 20 minutes it had stopped, and I, foolishly, thought that would probably be it. So I headed out of the hotel in a light drizzle over to the bus stop to catch the bus into town.

Sitting on the bus the weather deteriorated quite a bit and by the time I got to the city centre it was raining heavily and steadily.

Thankfully, a very large number of Turin’s streets have porticos along them, so I was able to wander around quite a bit of the town without actually getting wet.

I had a long wander around the city centre in the rain, before it started to ease off a little. I took this as a hint to catch the bus back to the hotel at this point as the bus stop didn’t have any shelter. Sure enough within a couple of minutes of getting on the bus the skies had opened again.