Skiing on the Alps in Bardonecchia

This past weekend was absolutely amazing! First of all I want to report that everyone returned from a weekend of skiing in one piece.  Saturday morning we boarded a train to Torino, Italy for a day of site seeing ad then off to Bardonecchia on Sunday for skiing.  Torino is a beautiful old city in Northern Italy, about two hours above Genova.  My first experince on the train went smoothly as I slept most of the way.  After getting to Torino, we found our hostel and check in.  I was a little nervous about staying in a hostel because this was also a first but to my surprise it was very clean.  At the cost of 15 Euro a night it was really good.  The rest of the day was spent site seeing.  Since we will be going to Torino again for one of our "Day Trips" for our architecture history class we focused on seeing a lot of the more modern architecture.  Torino was the site of the 2006 Winter Olympics so there had a been a lot of new improvements to the city in the last couple of years.  Early the next morning we boarded another train to Bardonecchia.  After about an hour of traveling deep into the Alps we reached a skiers paradise.  I had never seen as much snow that was on the ground in my life.  It was up to my shoulder in places.  Whole houses and cars were almost or completely covered with snow.  Camp Smith, the ski resort was bustling with people of all ages.  It boasted 40 runs and 20 lifts all of which were open.  Making it very easy to get up and down the mountain without any waits.  After a few minutes of confusion and trying to communicate with Italians we rented our gear and headed for the slopes.  Only skiing a couple of times in North Carolina I considered myself a beginner and wanted to head to the "bunny slope" for some warm ups.  But some of my group insisted that I would catch on quickly and that there was no need to waste time on the "bunny slope."  So we jumped on the chair lift and headed up the mountain.  When reaching the top I was amazed at the amount of small children.  Most of them could not have been any older than 5 or 6 at the most and they knew exactly what to do.  I was embarrassed to try to ski next to them.  They were very impressive and skillful skiers.  The first couple of times down were miserable for me. I slid down the slope more than I skied.  But it did not take to long before I caught on.  It was really a great time.  I have attached a few photos from the day below.