Sunday 23rd

No shifts this morning! But do you think I slept till late?! Of course no!! At 9.30 there was the last dance practice group (Federica and Massimo were in the one at 7am, no way was I going to wake up for that!!), and I didn't want to miss the Kerrs!
I had no problems getting inside the rink from the "staff" side, even if I wasn't wearing the blue uniform; a brief stop at the sport office to borrow Paola's camera and I was ready to start taking pics :)
First the music of the CD - Golden Waltz - was played for all couples, then followed by the single OD musics. A look at the costumes: the Kerrs were wearing very elegant black costumes, with some sparkles on Sinead's top. Isabelle Delobel had a white dress in a style that immediately rememberd of cabaret - easy to guess that they've chosen a charleston ;) I'm quite sure that the dress of Nathalie Pechalat was one used by Anissina for the 00/01 OD, while Fabien Bourzat had a black tuxedo. Then the O's: he was wearing a black tuxedo too, while she had an elegant light blue dress. Since I was mostly concentrated on taking pics (it was the first time I was using Paola's camera, so it took me a while before I could get nice shots!) I don't recall a lot of details from this practice session ^^;;
During the ice resurfacing I stopped at the office again and had a look on the internet... and, what?! I read on a message board that maybe Denkova & Stavisky were going to withdraw from the competition O__o No please, it can't be true!!! I immediately called Silvia, she was at the accreditation the night before, so I asked her if Albena & Maxim actually arrived in Torino. She said that yes, they were there, but Albena looked kind of ill...

According to my plans I should have gone back to the hotel as soon as the dance practice was over, but Francesca insisted for me to wait until the end of her shift, so I also watched a tiny bit of men practice. After lunch at the cantine, Francesca and I took a taxi for a new mission: get back Tatiana Navka's FD costume from the dressmaker! She had a problem with her costume during practice, so it needed to be repaired - but she also asked to shorten it on all sides (and I mean, it was already _so_ short on the front part!!). As it was Sunday, we had to go directly to the dressmaker's home; I waited down in the taxi (Francesca was worried that the taxi would have left without waiting, leaving her in an unknown part of the town :p), and it took her quite a lot before reappearing with the trophy - aka the dress! She explained that the dressmaker still had to finish ironing it, while her husband was busy cooking (at some point he poured something in the pan that made a flame and a cloud of smoke... and the poor dress was not so far from that!). Anyway, we got back to the skaters' hotel and left the costume at the reception - hoping that it wasn't going to be lost :p

I needed a break, so I went back to my hotel for a couple of hours, and then I met Laura and Eleonora for a tea. There were already funny anecdotes to talk about ;) The previous day Laura had a shift at the practice rink, and as the arrow indicating the "skaters' lounge" pointed in the wrong direction, she had to stay near the sign and show the skaters the right way - she practically became a living signpost :p When for the 743620 time she was asked where the skaters' lounge was, this time by Oleg Voiko, she answered as usual, but mispronouced "lounge" (sounded like "lunch"!) - and he corrected her pronunciation! From that moment she started hating him :p

At 5.30pm it was time to start my shift at Palaghiaccio Tazzoli; it was my first shift there, but I soon found out where the food resources were :p It was freezing cold, because the building was still unfinished and it let air draughts in... brrrr!!! When I arrived, men group n. 5 was on the ice, but only a few skaters were practicing, and the same for group n. 6. The worst was when _no one_ from group n. 1 (the one with the Russians - they weren't in Torino yet, only Graziev had arrived that morning, but I doubted he would have been there, and I was right!) took the ice... some random musics were played, and we just had to wait... or watch the pairs warming up around the rink! As the male and female dressing rooms were in two different corridors I had to stay halfway to check accesses, that meant I was in a place from where I could see a little bit of what happened on the ice ;) And, as said before, I had a close look (I tried to become one thing with the wall, not to disturb them!) at pairs warming up off ice. I love watching skaters trying jumps and lifts off ice, it looks like everything is so easy for them! Group 2 was the first to take the ice, and I recognized the Bestandigs just because Olga still had a little bit of fucsia in her hair (I remember that in Lausanne her hair were completely fuchsia!!!) :p while Jozef has now long hair in a pony tail. There was also a Ukranian couple in this group, and she looked so thin and pale that a friend of mine started calling her "cadaveria", which could be translated with something like "corpsy"?! Group 3 was the one with the 3 Russian couples, but none of them was there :( Other boring 40 minutes... In the next group there were the two German and the French pairs; both German couples looked new to me, and I was particularly impressed by Savchenko & Szolkowy. They had very good sbs jumps, and I started wondering why I had never seen them before (at the time I didn't realize she used to skate with Stanislav Morozov ^^;;); Aliona also looked very "flexible". Last on the ice was group 1, with other new faces, like the Bulgarian Spassova & Todorov (she was only 15 years old!); no one of this group really stood out, as all the couples had some problems with lifts (it looked like Vadim Akzolin had to do a really big effort to lift Julia Shapiro :p) and jumps.
Finally at 11pm the practice session was over, and I could take the shuttle back to the hotel. Couldn't wait to go to sleeeeeep!!
 

...go to day 4...