It Snows, but Mud Gets Last Laugh

The mountains had become about as depressing as mountains -- particularly Alps -- could be. These are the Winter Olympics, right? Isn't it supposed to be, like, winter?

Finally. If one were to leave the Irish Igloo, the home bar for the U.S. Olympic team in the tiny mountain village of Sestriere, in the wee hours of yesterday morning (not that one would do such a thing) he or she would have been treated to, of all things, a snow flurry. There could not have been a more welcome development or a happier walk home.

Maybe it was more than a flurry. Here they were, big, white flakes falling softly on all the muddy snow -- and just plain mud -- that had built up on the streets and sidewalks during the course of the Games. In the morning, it was still snowing, and the Alps looked Alpine for the first time. It was snowing hard enough that the training for the downhill portion of the women's combined event was canceled.

Alas, that was it. By noon, the snow had stopped. By 1 p.m., the sun was shining. And then, as the little rivers of mud began to flow back down the streets, the snow was gone.

-- Barry Svrluga

Kindness Spoken Here

The first week of the Olympics has seen Turin's transportation system take a beating from reporters who have turned griping into a sport -- carping about buses breaking down; drivers getting lost; drivers who make unscheduled stops (say, to pick up a friend along the roadside) and drivers who refuse to make unscheduled stops (say, for reporters who insist on being dropped at the train station rather than the designated bus stop).

Today, I rise in defense of the maligned Olympic transportation system and one volunteer in particular, who gave me a 75-mile ride home to my media village in Turin from the Alpine village of Sauze d'Oulx on Wednesday night in a sleek, comfortable Fiat so I wouldn't have to wait 45 minutes in the rain until the next bus arrived at midnight. Not only did my chauffeur deliver me to Via Verolengo 17 (my address in Turin), but he drove the Fiat right up onto the sidewalk so I wouldn't have to walk so far.

Better still, he gave me Italian lessons all the way home, at my request, cheering my pronunciation and never chiding me for my dismal command of any tense other than the present and any verb conjugation other than first-person singular and first-person plural.

A long car ride is ideal for expanding vocabulary.

As we passed through one small Alpine town, I learned that " lumi " means "lights" -- and " lumi Natale " means "Christmas lights." (This town hadn't taken its down yet.)

The moon is " la luna ," which sounds similar.

Tunnel was easy to learn. It is "tunnel," which is a masculine noun. Or you can say " galleria ," which is a feminine noun.

As we progressed from nouns to entire sentences, I learned that the Turinese are hopeful these Olympic Games will trigger an upswing in tourism; that most Italians can't wait to go to the polls in April to elect a prime minister who's more moderate than Silvio Berlusconi; that gasoline is very expensive in Italy; and that traffic tickets are expensive, too, but they're not nearly as bad as the " punti ," which means "points" on your license.

-- Liz Clarke