With the opening ceremony for the 2006 Winter Olympics only one day a way, poeple were working hard in Torino today. This image is from Piazza Castello, near what is known in Olympic gergo as the Medals Plaza. The area where athletes will receive their medals, listen to National Anthems and wave home to mom is sealed off to just about everybody at the moment. Here, Claudio Raimondi makes sure everything is straight on the last window into the Medals Plaza that they had to cover today. Nucaro Hubaldus talks about the origins of the Olympic Games in Greece, where he is from, while sitting on the steps in Piazza Castello, in Torino, Italy, on Thursday, Feb. 9. Hubaldus has been living in Torino for five months and was in the piazza reading the local paper, seemingly oblivious to a tv crew conducting an interview behind him. Local residents have had to get used to being in the spotlight since their city was chosen to host the 2006 Winter Olympics. Gianpaolo Leotta, a music student from Calabria, entertains locals and turists alike in Piazza Castello, in Torino, Italy, on Thursday, Feb. 9. The city has been buzzing with pre-Olympics energy and the streets are seeing a bustle that is more typical to summer than February. Claudio Raimondo puts the finishing touch on one of the windows looking into the Medals Plaza, in Piazza Castello, on Thursday, one day before the opening ceremony of the 2006 Winter Olympics, in Torino, Italy.

After a long Journey involving trains, planes, automobiles and buses, very little sleep, and a crying baby on a seven and a half hour transatlantic flight, I have finally arrived in Torino. It's good to be home. Already, the journey is long forgotten, even the crying baby, and I have decompressed and found my bearings between cappuccinos, familiar streets and old friends. The city is the same, the people also. The first place I sat my tired self down, suitcase and all, was a caffè I hadn't visited in over two years. I walked in and was received by an "It's been a long time since I last saw you!" from the owner sitting behind the cash register, glasses perched on the tip of his nose. Memories of after-school rendez-vous with good friends flooded in and I simply smiled and knodded, not feeling like delving into the whole "I moved away, I now live in America, and not in New York City" thing quite yet. So as you see, you can give a city a facelift, something they seem to be trying to do to my city, but its essence, its core, will never change. And really, who would want it to? It's nice being able to know that anywhere I go, I'm probably going to meet someone who knows me, my mother, my history and maybe something about my present. They treat me the same, a little like a foreigner, "The American has returned!", and a lot like one of their own, "Eat, you're too skinny!".