The Best Chocolate in Turin

Being the "B" or relief team on the TV coverage of the Olympic Winter Games has it's advantages and it's disadvantages. A disadvantage is that we have a lot of downtime while we wait for a call to a venue to relieve someone. The advantage is that we have a lot of downtime while we wait for a call to a venue to relieve someone.

So to kill some of that time today a small group of us decided to go on another field trip to "scout" out the medals plaza at Piazza Castello in downtown Turin.

Here there are free nightly concerts here right before they show the medal winners from the days' events. Last night Kelly Clarkson played, tonight Duran Duran. (Sorry Karis, there were no tickets left)

We had our trusty "Best of Turin" book from Lonely Planet and decided to explore a little more. We walked through the various narrow Roman-style streets past cafés, shops, and restaurants.

We stopped into the Museum of the Shroud of Turin. It's not the chapel that the shroud is in, but it's a museum about the shroud. Here you can actually see a replica of the shroud and there's a film about it you can watch as well. Normally it costs €5.50 to see the exhibits and watch the film. But an older Italian woman, who barely spoke English, took us through for free. She tried very hard but did a good job telling us the history of the shroud.

The actual shroud is kept in the Shroud Cathedral in another part of town. It is kept under glass and in concrete to only be taken out every 25 years.

After that, we walked through more narrow Roman-style streets when we decided to go to a little coffee shop that is mentioned in the Lonely Planet book.

It's called "Al Bicerin" and they make the best chocolate in Turin. It's a cafe that has been there since 1763 and has always been exculsively run by women.

We grabbed a table inside and ordered their specialty Bicerin which is a Torinese specialty made of coffee, dark chocolate, milk and whipped cream.

It was the best coffee I've had so far in Italy and that's saying a lot. All the coffee here has been better than the crap Starbucks is trying to make us drink. The price was about the same though, €4.00.

After that we left to a little trattoria for lunch. As we walked in a server was carrying two plates of spaghetti covered in a black sauce. Actually, it wasn't a sauce, per se...it was squid ink. Dom, the resident Brit vision mixer, said it was a delicious dish that he ate once when he lived in Rome. He ordered it...I couldn't muster up the bravery to try it, so I ordered the Sicilian Spaghetti. I tried a bit of the Squid Ink Spaghetti though...not too bad. A little fishy. I'll stick with the Bicerin...

So that's the adventure some colleagues and I had today. Tomorrow we're talking about actually going to Pinerolo to check out some of the Curling. We have passes that get us into ANY venue. Pretty sweet.