February 8
Sleeping last night was a little better. Good thing, because we don't know how much longer we could keep up this pace without sufficient sleep! We've got a fairly low-key today with women's ice hockey - Sweden vs France at 4:40 PM at the same Rho stadium we've gone to twice already.
We got up late and ate breakfast on the late side, so Steve works on his blog until about 1:30 PM. We go out to lunch at a fast-food place that was advertised in the Vesta metro station (our "home" station). Beth has a prosciutto and cheese focaccia sandwich and Steve has a silk chicken sandwich because he wanted to find out what silk chicken was. It turned out it had a sort of boiled texture, but also had some browning, but not to the same level as grilling would have. We also had two kinds of appetizers that looked like small hockey pucks - one spinach and quinoa and the other potato and cheese - really good and gave us some badly needed veggies.
Once on the metro, we found ourselves standing next to two tall women wearing NBC jackets. They asked about Steve's pins, which started a conversation. They were both colligate athletes who are runners (go-fors!) for the network. They had the day off today and their boss gave them tickets to ice hockey! One of them asked if we knew that Lindsey Vonn had crashed in the women's downhill. We said that to us, it was a little crazy that someone would try to ski the highest speed Olympic alpine event with a completely torn ACL in her knee. The other woman mentioned that she had torn her ACL playing basketball. What she found strange is that it hurt like hell for about 10 minutes and then didn't hurt anymore. She said that she actually didn't realize that she had torn her ACL until later. But she did mention that her knee was completely unstable afterwards. One of them said something about figure skating and Beth asked if Tara Lipinski (former Olympic gold medal winner in women's figure skating and now a color commentator for NBC) had really brought nine suitcases full of clothes to Milan. She laughed and said that yes, and so did her co-commentator Johnny Weir. She said they know for sure because most of those suitcases are currently stored in their office! If you get a chance to watch NBC's figure skating coverage, you will know why Beth asked the question. They are both fashionistas!
We have to change metro lines twice on our way to the Rho Ice Hockey arena. At one of the stations, we have to go outside of one building and into another. When we do, we see that part of the walkway is clear. When we get closer, we find that the station is built on top of a medieval building and archeologists are doing a dig to reveal the ancient walls:
We have heard that the current nasty version of norovirus is making its way through the women's hockey teams. Finland's game against Canada was postponed when Finland had only 10 healthy players (a normal team has 20) and the next day Finland played the US still with only 10 players. (We guess that when the organizers realized that multiple teams had illness issues they realized they couldn't postpone all the games in the time they had to work with.) We also heard that the Swiss team is impacted so we half-expected that one team would only have a few players. Fortunately, both teams seemed to be at full strength.
The bad news for France (0 Wins, 2 Losses) is that Sweden (2 Wins, 0 Losses) is absolutely at full strength. This means that the French goalkeeper, Alice Philbert is going to be very busy! After one period, Sweden is already ahead 3-0. We are not sure if the French buckled down or if the Swedes took it easy, but the final score was only 4-0 with Philbert making 44 saves. Here are some pictures of the action:
No comments:
Post a Comment