Back in London

I'm back in the U.K. once more, this time for a week, and won't be back in the Netherlands until Sunday evening.

It feels I haven't been home for ages, wherever home may be. According to Marvin, it's where I lay my hat and, given I have plenty of hats, it might take me a while to solve the dilemma

It's surprising, and perhaps slightly worrying, how quickly I set back into he London pace. It feels as if I never really left.

As I was strolling down to the Southbank yesterday I was amazed at the feeling of not feeling as an "alien" to this place. I haven't complained about "bloody tourists" yet, but I got till Sunday to reach at level!

Despite the fact nothing really changed, I could see some changes around.

Mind you, granny are still walking faster here than I do, people are always in an hurry, but some things are different. Maybe the Olympics will really do something for this place (huge economics losses aside, obviously)!

For example, it seems that the tube is slightly cleaner than what I remember... Or maybe it's just the distance that made me look at it with kinder eyes, or I just have to wait for the Friday night heavy boozers to rethink the notion!

Anyway, for the time being I'll enjoy things as they are and maybe spot some other of the eggs involved in the big egg hunt. Not sure whether the adjective refers to the dimension of the hunt or of the eggs themselves!

 

In Brussels

After Tilburg, I kept checking to see if Wilco were coming back to Europe for another tour. When I found out that yes, they were returning to Europe, I checked the dates and cities and I quickly realized Holland was not an option: they were playing in Groeningen, that is not so far from Amsterdam as the lack of public transportation makes you want to believe. It looked that I had to add an extra day anyway, so, why not going somewhere I've never been? Or maybe go back to Italy?
At the end I went for option number one and headed to Brussels.

The concert was great: Wilco were at the top of their form, nobody complained I sang and
Ancienne Belgique is a great concert hall with an amazing acoustics.
Even so, though, I got a big doubt that grew bigger and bigger in the past concerts: is there a I of dress code to be a member kind of the band?
No, seriously, I mean it:  it looks like Nels, Pat and John have bought trousers and shirts in the same shop (bulk buy?) and Glenn and Mikael sport the same kind of mustache! And it's not the first time I noticed.
I know that I was there for the music, but I can't help it! If I weren't so short and the stage not so high, I'd probably have some comments about the shoes as well! Not that I ever ask any of them a similar question if I ever met them... well, that depends on the shoes they sport!

But let's not get side tracked, as the topic at hand is my weekend in Brussels. The only problem now is to convince my brain to work, as it seems to short-circuit at the mere mention of the town.
Apparently my brain associates its name to the chocolate and the simple memory of it sends it into a cocoa induced external dimension, made of chocolate, truffles, cocoa powder and gosh I'm tripping again! One of the first thing I did in Brussels was trying a hot chocolate at Pierre Marcolini.
At the beginning I was not entirely convinced, years of life abroad taught me to be very aware and doubtful when it comes to hot chocolate and the drink in my hand looked too liquid and not dark enough. Boy, was I wrong!
After the first sip of it, my taste buds went haywire. I come from Torino, we know two or three things about chocolate and right now I'm loving in a place where chocomel is considered to be cocoa based, let alone good! So drinking this hot chocolate was just like heaven, even better than that, given I'm an atheist.

I can't say I found Brussels beautiful, in the way I can say Florence or Paris are.
But Brussels got charm, it's fascinating and enchanting.

I was lucky because I happened to be there just on time for the museum night, so after the concert I went around museums up till late. I even met some old friend in a museum:

I spent hours walking around, soaking in the atmosphere, in the pace of the town and its people, in the voices all around me.
I told some friends it gives me the same kind of vibe Genoa does: maybe it's because I've been used to live in flatland and having to face streets going up and now, constantly turning around. It's the odd mixture of expensive shops in run down neighbourhood, the rhythm of life.
If it weren't for the museum night I probably wouldn't have been to so many museums, but I still have the impression I've seen a lot and done even more.
And I'm not just talking about beer tasting!

And after this weekend, another trip is about to begin.
London here I come.
Brussels, wait for me, I shall be back.

off to another Wilco concert...

Beth says I'm basically stalking the guys.
I am not sure whether she was joking or not. Part of me believes she wasn't. Another one might even agree with her.
All together though, it's not something so important and urgent to agree upon.
I'm off to Brussels for 2 days of friet, beer, chocolate, some sightseeing and hell yeah! Wilco's gig at Ancienne Belgique!

Unravelling the weekend

My mum finds it funny and wastes no opportunity to tell me so: "How come you left England, and now it seems you're always there?"
If you keep in mind that I just spent a long weekend in England and on Monday evening I'll be back in London, you mind want to join her in laughing at me!

Anyway it's not that I planned that way, it just happened. I had in mind to go back to England at the end of February for quite some time, as it's the weekend of Unravel at Farnham.
Last year I enjoyed Unravel a lot and thought it'd be nice to go back once more. I like Farnham and the Maltings, and I think I needed no extra excuse to book some days off, a plane ticket and pack my suitcase.

I spent my whole short holiday outside of London, mainly Hampshire and a little bit of Surrey too.
I went back to Guildford, that looks pretty much the same, even though some parts changed a lot: nice shops, slow life pace, odd mixture of broke uni students and posh Tory housewives.

I went back to Farnborough as well, to the new pub opened next to Sainsbury's... I can't say they haven't tried to improve it, but the town still looks and feels so awkward and dull. Still, it was the right location to meet some old colleagues over a pint (ok, two pints).

Saturday was basically spent in Farnham for Unravel and catching up with May.
How much do I love Unravel? A lot. I had a lot of fun last year and this year was pretty much the same. The fact we chose to go on Saturday, rather than Sunday helped too as it was less crowded.
Farnham is not-so-subtly yarn bombed. You can find knitted and crafty decoration basically everywhere.

I like the cheerfulness and quirkiness of the whole event, the smiles, the helpfulness of people at the stands, the laughters! I enjoy looking around me at all the different things going on: the doubts on people faces when looking at yarn, should I buy it or should I not?, the boredom of husbands and boyfriends dragged to the Maltings, the man sleeping at one of the stall.
I like the atmosphere, that weird combination of small little things that fell into the right place: spending time with some good friends, introducing them to one another, enjoying a fresh ginger beer.

Before I had time to come to term with it, it was time to leave and go back to Holland.
And now I got very little time left to think about what to put in the suitcase for the next weekend and week away.
Being away from Holland did me good. It was funny and calming, I got back to the office on Tuesday and everybody told me I look so much better and refreshed.
Now, this is what makes me laugh, much more than the fact I have been going back to England more times than I have gone to Italy right now.
While living in England, I always had the notion that I couldn't bear the stress of living there, yet going back there reduced by stress level. Fact is that England, London had partially worked as scapegoats for me. It wouldn't be fair to say it's all their fault I was not feeling well when I was living there.
I've always been a nervous person and anxiety runs happily in my blood. The situation got worse because of my living there, but the problems were there already and I haven't solved them yet.
They are still here with me, but I chose to forget about them for four days.
Sometimes it happens that things get easy to look at and to think about, if you let them be and just go with the flow. It's not an hard thing to do, after all.

Something is rotten...

... in the state of Holland.


Literally.
I read several articles recently about the use, overuse and misuse of "literally" in English.
But I mean it. Literally! It's the second day in a row that this country, or at least the Hoofddorp area where my office is located, stinks. And it stinks badly, as if somebody had left the buttermilk to go rotten in the heat of an August afternoon.


It stinks!!! 
It stinks of cow poo, pollution, dampness, rotten grass and, yeah, of rotten buttermilk!

ohmygod! shataaaap!

I had no TV in England for quite a long time and lived of reruns on BBC iPlayer.
My friend Beth knew that and felt it was her duty to show me what I was missing out by not having a TV and not having a pay-TV subscription.


Any dinner or party at Vasi's had to include at least 10 minutes of junk TV. The junkier the better.
I think she enjoys watching me watching TV (ah ah), squirming with embarrassment. If there's one state of mind that trash TV makes me painfully aware of is self-consciousness. I watch the people on TV making a fool of themselves, showing themselves at their worst; or is it their best? I'm not sure I want an answer for this question
They go on displaying how limited their view on the world is, how thick their minds are and they just think they are the coolest people on the planet. Well, I watch them and I feel embarrassed and self-conscious on their behalf.


I went back to England to visit Beth last weekend and I think she outdid herself on this matter. She made me watch "The only way is Essex", or Towie.
I had read something about it in the past and I thought I was prepared for what I was about to watch. Naive Virgi!
It is so bad, so intrinsically and extrinsically bad, so-so-so-so bad that I don't even know where to start to describe how bad it is, that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to find a way to describe all the different way it is bad.


It is so bad that I can't even feel embarrassed for the people in it! They are such a bunch of egotistical, clueless of anything going on in the world outside the spray-tan salon that I just find myself hoping they are not real. 
I'm not even sure exactly which part of the whole show is the worse: the fact they all look like carrot? Or the realization that their teeth look as big as those of an horse? With a better oral hygiene, but still as big as horse teeth.
More than the huge fake boobs, it was the spread of huge fake eyelashes that really got me: how can the girls keep a balance? How can they wear  those eyelashes without their weights bringing them to fall forward?


And then there is the Essex accent. Beth and I watched on BBC news how a school in Essex has elocution classes to help its pupils to learn how to speak properly so they can read better and spell correctly.
Every accent is a fascinating world to me, I like the notion that even when speaking a common language, the way it's spoken gives away so many details about the people that is currently talking.


Yet their strong accent, combined with their standard conversation is a unique, unnerving combination: "Ohmygod! shaaatap, I'm so jel, yeah, no, younouwatimean? Soooo fuuuunny! Don't be jel of my fake boobs, babes! You just need a bit of fake tan, ohmygod! It's so reem, ohmygod, we got fake boobs and we're on telly, you don't say it!"

So after watching around 10 minutes of it and suffering through every single second of it, I am pretty confident nothing that trash TV can throw at me can scare me any longer.

The downside is that part of my brain is now talking to me in TOWIE accent and ohmygod!, no matter how many time I told it to shaaataaap it never does: not reem at all!

Ma che, davvero?

A volte non so proprio cosa pensarne. E nemmeno se pensarci possa servire a qualcosa. Il Corriere, come molti altri quotidiani italiani, è sempre sul pezzo.
"La Rai e la <<clausola gravidanza>> - Succede anche in altre aziende?"

La risposta la sanno tutti tranne i giornalisti, a quanto pare: no, in una tristemente elevata percentuale, le aziende  fanno in fase di colloquio una quantità spropositata di domande sulla  situazione famigliare di una donna. 
"Quanti anni hai? Sei fidanzata? Sei sposata? Hai figli? Pensi di volerne? Hai in progetto una gravidanza? I tuoi genitori potrebbero fare da baby-sitter ad un eventuale bambino?"
Se hai un fidanzato/marito/figli oppure non sei ancora entrata in menopausa, magari ti assumono anche, facendoti però firmare una lettera postdatata di dimissioni da usare per lasciarti a casa nel malaugurato caso tu decida di mettere al mondo un pupo.
La Rai mette nero su bianco una situazione che è comune a tutto il bel paese, salvo il fatto che le aziende medio-piccole sono a volte messe peggio, e si scatena il putiferio: va benissimo, ma cosa dovrei dire o fare? 
Devo sentire un'indignazione maggiore per via del canone Rai?
Oppure devo prepararmi a sentire la rabbia salire di nuovo, appena l'articolo sprofonderà nelle zone basse dell'homepage del Corriere per essere dimenticata fino a quando le testate giornalistiche saranno a corto di idee per riempire i vuoti fra un articolo sulla farfalla tatuata di Belen e le partite di Champions?

Forse mi conviene interrogarmi di più sullo stato del giornalismo in Italia, dove sempre più diffusa, si legge questa sorpresa a scoprire il paese così com'è.
Le donne sono discriminate sul lavoro.
Ma che, davvero?
L'economia italiana è in crisi nera.
Ma che, davvero?
I consumi non decollano perché la gente non ha soldi da spendere.
Ma che, davvero?

E' il nuovo mantra degli eredi di Montanelli.

Ma che, davvero? 

I giornalisti italiani sembrano cadere tutti dal pero.