Tired Tuesday

By Tuesday morning the truculent breakfast room woman had finally caught on to the whole “milk in the coffee” concept. I celebrated by having two soup bowls full. Which was fortunate, because this was the morning of the endless walk. Despite our possession of a bus, we had for some reason decided to walk to “Belissimo” (“It looked much closer on the map…”). Perhaps they couldn’t decide whether group A or group B should get the bus, so instead it was more egalitarian to make both groups suffer.

We arrived at the ironically named Belissimo after miles of pavement spaghetti. It was in the middle of an industrial estate, with nothing Belle about it. To get inside we climbed up onto the roof of the building, feeling momentarily like catburglers, and entered the paper-overflowing studio. I’m not really sure how the business stayed running. The owner hadn’t bothered to prepare us any info about his company, and answered sleepily any questions that came his way (can’t you guys just let me go back to bed?). Eventually he begrudgingly handed us some brief sheets so we could discuss the various clients of his company. We discussed meaninglessly for an hour or more and then escaped to have lunch on the catburgler roof terrace. The building had one virtue; the roof was black. The vitamin deprived Dutch students lounged happily, taking the rare opportunity to photosynthesize while we gnawed on our sandwiches.

At length a wasp arrived, and dying of starvation in this barren industrial wasteland, decided it wanted Maureen’s sandwich. It circled around her head on and off for the next 30 minutes, taking every opportunity when she relaxed her defenses to land, triumphant, on her salami. She snapped at it like a terrier, snarling and shaking her head from side to side while she waved her sandwich around like a wizard gone mad. I was laughing so hard I was crying, but still the performance went on. At last she finished sandwich and Maureen, the wasp and I all had some reprieve.

Belissimo thanked us with a gift of a Bombay Sapphire Inspirational Box. This contained an inspirational tape measure, an inspirational notebook, inspirational pins, inspirational ink and brush, inspirational pencil, and most inspirational of all, a miniature bottle of gin. My gratitude alas, was tempered by the long walk through the city carrying the heavy bag which was trying its best to sever my fingers.

Our next point of arrival was with the same hopeless Belissimo manager, with whom we were supposed to be discussing a scheme of how to promote Torino as a design city. The presentation once again consisted of him apologizing repeatedly that he hadn’t had any time to prepare a presentation, while his audience fell into coma, one at a time.

Koen’s brilliant plan to liven things up backfired catastrophically. “Why don’t we split up and do some workshops to come up with some more ideas? “ Luca glanced at his watch “Well actually, I have to leave early (after arriving late), but maybe you can come back again tomorrow and do some more workshops at Belissimo.
Guido: “well actually, we have a rather tight schedule”
Luca: “you don’t have time free in the afternoons and evenings?”
Guido: “well yes….we have FREE time”
Luca: “well maybe some people will like to come back to Belissimo in the free time and we can do some more workshops and have some coffee.”
Inside everyone was screaming “no…No….NO!”, but despite everyone best intentions an appointment somehow got tentatively scheduled for the next afternoon, so Luca could drain our souls with some more of his apathy. Fortunately, Guido saved the day by ringing up and canceling as soon as we were out of Luca’s general vicinity.

At last we escaped to a small bar, which amazed everybody by shutting before dinner so we ended up in a fish restaurant instead. I dined on an amazing fish risotto accompanied of course by the obligatory carafe of wine. During the evening I experienced despair, exhilaration and all shades of emotion in between, in the refreshingly short space of three minutes. I thought I had accidentally deleted all my photographs from the past three days in Torino, but then made the miraculous discovery that my memory card had popped out of its slot and wasn’t being registered. Oh astronomical, heady delight!

Somewhere around the vicinity of 10 o’clock we tumbled out of the restaurant and started fencing on the street with Grissini bread sticks. I’m not quite sure how it began, it just seemed like a natural progression of the evening. They made excellent foils, breaking shorter and shorter until it was easy to determine the winner as being the one who had something left to hold onto at the end. This diversion continued until the breadsticks, alas, ran out.

Later on found us back in 5km. Rejoicing in the comparative warmth of Italy, we basked outdoors in the evening stillness, ordering round after round of Mojitos. After the first couple people started making them stronger, digging out their bottles of gin and adding a little more fortification. Suddenly I noticed to my horror that a breach of security had occurred. Somebody had removed the plastic wrap on my inspirational Bombay Sapphire Box. I had carried it around all day, largely to retain possession of the gin and here…..I opened the box with bated breath….shock horror! My gin was gone!

All hell broke loose.

“Who took it! Was it you! Was it you?!” More aghast than anything that someone had taken it without my noticing, when my foot was practically resting inside the bag Eventually I thought I had established the identity of the culprit, when Thomas meekly handed me a bottle. My wrath calmed, I settled back into my former state of relaxation.

But the mystery will never be solved. Later rumours and whisperings informed me that Thomas had been in possession of two bags from the beginning, and had only given me his spare in order to pacify the raging Madeleine gin-monster. The new suspect became Guido….but he denies it fervently. Like Bermuda triangle or the Roswell incident…. No one will ever know what really happened that night.

The evening ended insalubriously as I rolled meekly down via Garibaldi, wedged between Koen and Thomas for support, and we bundled into a taxi. Remarkably, we found ourselves in back in front of the hostel. Arriving in the common room I discovered that Greg and Maarten were still awake. Well I thought, I’ll spend a little time relaxing with them before I head off to bed. It was the work of a few seconds to reveal that they were in fact, far too drunk to communicate. Instead, they were now only capable of taking turns to slap each other in the face. I decided not to be involved.