"Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano."

After one week in Torino...
... what could I tell you ? I don't know, there are so many things that happened since my arrival in Torino. Well, I'll try to think about Torino, to order a little bit all the things that pops up in my mind, and then to write it.


Torino ?
After a long time of intensive searchs (30 seconds max), I'm now able to explain you a little bit the history of the city of Torino, aka Turin. So, let's start the quotation marks and give the word to a famous anonymity : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turin.
Now we can close the quotation marks and thank a lot this nice guy/girl for having share all his/her knowledge !

To summarize, you should know about Torino that :

• "Torino" means "little bull" in Italian (it's why the symbol of the city is a bull) ;
• the automobile company FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino), the vermouth Martini and a lot of other things are from Torino ;
• Torino hosts the Winter Olympics in 2006 ;
• Torino is the capital of Piedmont ;
• almost 1 million of people live in Torino ;
• Torino is an industrial city, but I'd like to add that it's however also a beautiful city.
  

Finding an apartment
That's for sure the most difficult part when you arrive in Torino. There are several ways to (try to) find a lodging in Torino :

• asking a room in one of the residences of the University : because there aren't enough rooms for all the students, it's more than probable that you'll have to find a room by yourself...
• advertisements on the walls of Polito (corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24)
• Sportellocasa : a kind of free agency for the students, that can help you to find a room
• torino.bakeca.it : a website where you can put and read some advertisements for flats, rooms, etc.

Moreover, because the accommodation are quite expensive, a lot of students live in double
rooms ("camere doppie"), but you can also find some single rooms ("camere singole") as we're
used to have in Belgium.

By the way, I'd like to thank another time Katia and her family for their hospitality. It
really helped me a lot !


Filling all the administrative forms
As usual when you go abroad for a long time, there're several administrative stuffs to do. I guess it's a kind of way to make busy the foreign students who arrived before the start of the lectures ?
However, don't worry for that : at the arrival meeting you receive a survival guide well done where you can find all the informations needed. Actually I didn't expect a so good organisation, at least with regard to the adminisrative things.


Eating
First of all, I can ensure you that the italian food (cucina italiana) is one of the best of the world ! at least IMHO...
OK, even if italian food is very varied, I have to admitted that I ate already so many pizzas here that I can't remember how many I ate already in 1 week.

Hopefully, for the lazy and quite bad-cooker students as me, God (or the Italian people) invented the Mensa ! "La Mensa" is a restaurant/canteen of the university, as it exists in Belgium and in many other countries, but with a huge difference : here the food is good !
Moreover, there is a discount for the foreign students. In conclusion, you can find good and
cheap food, so what should you cook ?
However, because I'm not always lazy, I really want to (and I will) learn how to cook some Italian dishes (no, a frozzen pizza isn't considered as a real dish) during my 2 years here !

Another important thing to know about the food in Torino is the "aperitivi" (aperitifs). OK,
I'm sure you'll tell me that it exists also in your country, but the idea here is a little bit different.
Firstly, the aperitivi here aren't peanuts and chips : it's several dishes of pastas, vegetables, meat, seafood and fruits.
Secondly, if you come during the evening in some bars in Torino, you pay a drink (around 5€) and you can eat as much aperitivi as you want. So the aperitivi are also a good and cheap way to eat here !




The strike (lo scioppero)
After one week in Torino, I wasn't lucky : the day I had to move in my new apartment, it rains all during the day and - last but not least - there was a public transportation strike ! Yeah !

Parli italiano ?
If your motherlanguage is French (or any other Latin language, Spanish for instance), it shouldn't be too difficult to learn Italian ! If you don't know an Italian word, you can just use the French word and add "o" or "a" at the end. In this way you find, with a probability of 50%, the right Italian word !

Personally, I followed last year an Italian course, and I'm quite surprised of my Italian level. The biggest problem is that the Italian speak really fast sometimes, thus it becomes quite hard to understand anything...

Otherwise, Polito (Politechnico of Torino) provides an Italian course for the foreign students, but - at least from my point of view - it isn't really useful ; the only good thing is that this course is a good way to meet other Erasmus and foreign students...



OK, I think that's all for today. The next times I'll try to speak about the cities, Polito, the night life, the LBG of Torino and I don't know yet what else.