Grande Spectaculari

This weekend was Italy and the World Cup. I love going to Italy, just about everything I observe there makes me laugh. A few of us during the trip decided to see who could find the longest, most ridiculous word in Italian. I'm convinced that half of what I hear is actually made up. There's no way they can be real words. The rules are. Add together as many Italian words as you can, roll the r's, always end with an 'i' and over-emphasise everything. For example escussiscolarigrandispectacularialtheti. See I just made that up, but someone in Italy knows what that means. No wonder Scrabble in Italy must be something entirely different altogether. I soon learned to zone it all out, and just listen for the very subtle mention of my name somewhere in amongst....right, there I go, time for me to climb! Either that or they are just insulting us without us knowing?

The finalists previewing the final route.

I climbed okay this time, limiting my under pressure competition mistakes to just one. It lost me time though and eventually became my downfall, as I just narrowly missed out on the finals. But at least this time the organisers realised that I was representing Denmark and not the UK. Overall I was pretty psyched though as my preparation went well and I felt strong whilst climbing. For my Italy World Cup debut it wasn't too bad.

Team America coming to save the world with Champagne.

These trips abroad are always a bit of a struggle. Generally I rarely ever speak any of the language of the host country. Such as this weekend, which was littered with incidents where people spoke to me in fast Italian, I shrugged my shoulders, they continued to speak in faster Italian and I shrugged my shoulders some more. It's hilarious really. When Markus was interviewed after the final, the interviewer hit him with a long barrage of Italian. He then took a guess of what the question might roughly have been about and responded into fluent German. Most of the crowd understood none of what happened. But all that mattered was that both people nodded and shook hands and that reflected some sort of general agreement.

Those that fell early were escorted to the 'kids area'.

I find the travelling a bit of struggle sometimes too. I'm a pure 'thoroughbred' climber. I hate walking to places and don't really like the action of travelling. I just want to reach the destination as soon as possible and climb as soon as possible. Driving on Italian roads has scarred my consciousness for eternity in the past and this weekend I remembered why. I don't yet fully comprehend why you would bother having speed limits on roads, when no one does less than twice the limit. I also don't understand how you can get away with people simultaneously overtaking and undertaking you at 160kph on the autostrada. I'd love to see some stats on road accident deaths in Italy.

Precision packing, the story of my life.

After I had managed to navigate the way back to Milan last night without crashing the car, I raced to the airport, screeched into the drop off area, grabbed bags and ran to the check in. Leaving my poor American buddies to try and drive the 'manual', 'toy' car round Milan airport to get to the drop off point. I heard that it took them 4 or 5 circuits of the airport ring road before they found where the car hire depot was. Meanwhile I made it from check in to plane in a record 12 mins (I don't recommend that anyone tries jumping the fence at the security gate in future though). I can tell you I slept like a baby afterwards.

Next it's the World Championships in Switzerland. The way this season is turning out I think I might write a piece later on about people. So many of the best stories are about the personalities of the people.