According to me writers are people who happen to be living a pretty boring/ very unfortunate period of their lives. I haven’t been writing on this blog for ages and, honestly, I didn’t miss it very much. That  because I was too busy living my life that, lately, has become as interesting and varied as a South American telenovela. In the last month I almost settled in bloody Bucharest to organize our annual conference, I spent the two most amazing ever weeks in Algeria, I broke up with my boyfriend with the only interesting result that now I’m wondering who the hell am I, where do I come from and where will I end up. But it was nonetheless an interesting period, so much interesting that I didn’t have the time to write. So, there you are, the demonstration that writers are people who have very boring lives. Now, since I’m writing on this blog, you don’t need to be a genius to understand that my period of turbolence is now over and that I’m bored enough to write on this blog. 

Sunday bloody sunday. You know you’re young if the morning after having collapsed on your friend’s bathroom floor you feel all sparkling and cool. Well, at least I’m young. But, according to the evidence, my thirty-something years old cousin E is way younger than me. At 9.30 she  rang at the door and, as soon as C opened the door, the Tazmanian Devil entered the room, opened the windows letting:

- 100.000 volts sunrays enter our eyeballs

-  a gateau au framboise enter our throath

-1.000.000 words enter our soaring ears

 In about 10 minutes we were all dressed up and ready to go ( everyone except C, that stood home struggling with an aching teeth. It’s moving observing a  man and its relationship with his aching teeth. They have their indipendent lives, but still they influence each other, a little like Woody Allen and Mia Farrow at the old times).

…to be continued

In the desperate effort to ease the digestion of tandoori-Ganesh-knows-what that we had had in the Indian quarter, we headed to the Paris Mosquee to meet C’s best friend V for a shisha. Smoking the shisha together is, for the three of us, a little like buiding sticks huts for the three little pigs, but it felt a little strange for me experiencing my friends of the “Alexandria period” ( we spent 2 weeks together in Egypt organising a training session on blogs addressed to Mediterranean women journalists. You should have seen them, the only men in a total-girly envoronment…their satanic look, as a kid in a candy shop…anyway) in their everyday environment. When, after a long, pleasent walk across the Jardins de Plantes ( wow!) we got to the Musquee, V., his cell phone in one hand, the other one hand scribbling something on a notebook, was ACTUALLY working.

After having smoked our ass out remembering the old good times, P. decided to continue our tour in the Paris you don’t expect: we grabbed a metro till Place d’Italie, and then we walked all the way till the hugest Chinatown I’ve ever seen. We politely refused when P. proposed to sit somewhere and have some Chinese soup ( it was 6.00 pm, for Buddha’s sake!..or saké..), and we wondered like 4 Alices in Wonderland in some crowdy, funny-smelling shops, looking for some ( any) furniture to put in C’ apartment and for those nice porcelain cats that say hallo! with the hand.

On our way home ( the bus passed by Notre Dame, and we couldn’t help to say Oh! as always happens when you pass by Notre Dame), we went to the Monoprix ( huge French Supermarket) to get some very french Cheese, very French paté and very Italian Negroni ( aweful cocktail that tastes like gas) and we rushed home for our Parisian dinner.

I have very cloudy souvenirs of what happened after my 6th Negroni, but I can still feel the happiness I felt being surrounded by my friends, lying in C’s bathroom floor.

When you think about Paris, first thing that comes into your mind is of course the Eiffel Tower, but the second one should be a flock of couples almost making out all around. Well, you’re not that wrong. Paris is the Sweethearts Capital, but it can also be much more than this. Last weekend M and I went to Paris at our friend C’s and, even if we’d already been in the Ville Lumiere more than once, it had been able to surprise us as if it was a completely different town we were visiting.

C. lives close to Place de la Republique, and I couldn’t imagine a better neighbourhood for him to live in, as he - who’s in love with the Arab world, or, at least, with the Arab food, the Arab tobacco in the Arab pipe and, of course, the Arab women -  can find there many kebab restaurants ( the smoke coming from the windows smelle greasy enough, but I wouldn’t swear that the brown stuff turning round and round was actual lamb meat …well, only the braves…) and even a Hammam, a Turkish Bath, to spend the afternoons at ( unless you don’t like mushrooms…neither to drink nor under your feet).

 Saturday morning we met P for breakfast ( trip tip: if you’re Italian and you can’t start your morning without an espresso, you’d better ask for a café serré, or you’ll end up depressed, forcing yourself to sip dirty hot water from a huge cup, that will automatically lead you to the closest toilet to eject what you’ve just ingested…let’s consider it some kind of natural colonscopy ). P is a handsome, smart middle-aged man with an astonishing predisposition for foreign languages, and he entertained us with jokes in German and Greek as we relaxed in a small café, lazily staring at a mill-run that made the whole scene look as if it was settled in Amsterdam. When one of the waiters started to fight with the clochard that has permanently settled in the cute, fancy kiosk right in front C’s apartment, we decided it was time to go, so we left Amsterdam and headed towards Paris Indian quarter.

P brought us in a super weird roofed street, where we walked for a while taking thousands of pictures to carnival suites shops and to huge papier-maché Indian elephants. There were also many Afro hairdressers, and grocers that sold varieties of fruit we couldn’t recognise, and the everything looked and smelled of India in such a way that you could expect a baboon jumping on your head all of a sudden.

Regardlessly to our stomach we asked for some original French Tandoori chicken and basmati rice, while a young guy tried some scarves on in the shop en face, jiggling as P gave him suggestion to the colour that better suited him.

Life can be a mess, but if you are in Paris, you don’t care.

God, I missed writing on this blog, but it has been a crazy crazy week, and I barely had the time to breath.

Anyway, best thing of the week is I’ve been to Paris with my friend M and that we had a super good time with our French friends. Anyway, guess our French trip deserves an ad-hoc post, so i’ll soon inaugurate a “J’adore Paris, part II” session.

For now, only thing I can say is that I feel extremely pissed since I put my beautiful boot-dressed foot on the Italian soil. Weather is crappy, I gotta be very careful to avoid the puking flu that is affecting the office, and I’m fricking overwhelmed with things to do. But all of this could just be a small cloud passing by the sunshine of my life, if it wasn’t for a creepy phenomenon ( even creepier than astracan grannies…can you believe that?) that is occurring in these days in Italy: San Remo Italian Song Festival.

Since my mother has always tried to make my sister and I grow as Sapiens Sapiens Women, we never had TV at home and we still don’t.

This of course caused me some problems at school, because I was the only one who didn’t know cartoons jingles ( so I soon had to learn how to playback).

Anyway, at least I grew up without knowing how San Remo Festival looked like.

First ( and last) good thing I learned about San Remo is that during San Remo Eve I can go to the cafeteria next to the office even at 9.30 and still find my favourite croissant. This happens because THE Italian festival organizers work in my office neighbourhood, and must all belong to the Sara’s Favourite Croissant Eaters Club, so I’m just glad that they got out of my way for couple of weeks.

Beside that, San Remo Festival is the biggest ( and most expensive) proof that life after death exists.

Avarage age of presentor, orchestra directors ( there are more than one, and they all look aweful), public and singers is 95, and now I see why the stage is always covered with flowers: they’re probably trying to get used to their next residence ( same flowers, only 6 feet below).

Songs sucked ( they all sounded like different kind of laments caused by different kind of stomach aches, and lyrics have the intensity of Sesame Street opening credits song), singers sucked ( some of them probably assumed Viagra or Cocaine, I even saw one who, while being interwied, started greeting people he recognised among the audience and told stories about Balkans that had no connections with the interview itself); the vice-presentor ( a 1m tall dwarf wearing enormous shoes with the colors of the Italian flag) touched between the legs and without any apparent reason the Director of the First Channel of Italian public television that was sitting among the audience; the idiocy of the two super models that usually jointly assist the presentor, this year ended up causing interferences with cameras, thus obliging the authors to alternate them.

My favourite performers so far are called “Frank Head” or somethig like that, they ARE che link between man and monkey, they cannot sing, they cannot dance, they don’t pretend to be human. Someone sincere, at last.

Ladies and gents, it’s with great pleasure that I announce you that an unbelievable number of people ended up on this blog last week searching for ”astracan” on Google, which is pretty scary, because I thought that astracan furs were stuff for 100 year old mummies, so I guess that

 1) astracan actually is the “new mink”

 or

2) there’s plenty of 100 years old grannies that surf on Google looking for astracan furs. 

Anyway there is something in the air today (as Phil Collins would have said) that makes people around me feel happy and makes me feel totally pissed.

- The sun rays transformed my french colleague J- who lately has been a little mellow because her boyfriend lives far away - in some kind of happy happy person that jumps all over the place and listens to happy happy music and speaks with a happy happy voice. I guess that if Teletubbies and Gremlins could couple, the result would sound very much like that.

- As I got in the office after my daily trip to the coffee machine, I found J and my other Tunisian colleague F talking about the names they’re going to give to their kids. Please note that none of them is pregnant. And there I am, starting to think that I’m turning into a man ( and not just a man,actually, I’d better say I’m turning in a NERD).  

This kid thing is starting to upset me. Last night I went with some friends to some other friend’s house. She lives with her husband and their one year old son right in front of Colosseum  in an ancient, awesome apartment. As I stood like an ass staring at the picture, I found myself telling ( pretty aloud): gee. this house is awesome. Too bad  that all that childish stuff spread everywhere hides the parquet.

Maybe I’m tuned on the Southern Hemisphere, so for me it’s almost autumn. Should check if when I flush the toilet water goes down clockwise.

Monday

It was 01.30 p.m. and there I stood in the street, with my suitcase next to me, waiting for my friend V. that was already half a hour late to drive me to the station. As she arrived ( 01.35 p.m.) she claims: ” Trains in Bari always leave in late. Trust me, it will never leave at 01.42, you’ll see”. What I saw, as soon as I flew to the platform and almost died for a heart attack, was a regional train that had no intention to bring me to Rome, as its destination was Enziteto Catino ( that sounds funny also for an Italian). Slowly, I walked back to the car parking where I found V., who was supposed to wait for my ok to leave, was stuck in her beautiful, whipped-cream white, brand new car, as a dozen unauthorized valets surrounded her screaming loudly gesticulating ( an unauthorized valet is a man you pay to look after your car even if he hasn’t an official authorization from the municipality. Of course you can also choose not to pay him, but you wouldn’t be sure that your car will be there when you’ll back).

I hesitated couple of minutes, wondering if it could be safer just running away and leave her to her destiny, but then friendship prevailed so I reached the car and jumped in, holding the suitcase in my arms like a baby. After having locked the car, we had an amazing conversation with all those  nice guys that, as I could understand only after V. translated for me, were trying to explain us that some homeless guy that lives in the train station had gone nuts and decided to chill out kicking my friend’s car. In fact, as we decided that the Car Parking Gang didn’t want to kill us and slowly got off the car, we could se the footprint of the above mentioned nutty guy on the crushed body of the car.

Couple of minutes later, a man that looked ( and smelled) like a bandit asked my friend her documents, and she was about to ask him to go screw himself when we suddenly realized he was a desguised policeman, who made her park her injured car in the police parking and asked her to follow him to the POLFER ( railway police) to inform on what had happened.

Half a hour later, as we drove out the parking, a traffic officer asked us to pull up and started to explain us he had to sanction us because we came from a street whose access was denied to civils. Weird thing, in the beginning, was that he didn’t look very impressed when V. told him we just got off the UNIPOL office and that it had been his UNIPOL colleague to tell us to park over there (we realized only later why he didn’t look very much sympathetic : the thing was V kept mistaking between POLFER and UNIPOL, which is the name of an insurance company).    

In the end, I reserved a seat in the 18.30 train that of course left with a 45 minutes late and arrived 1h and a half in late, so I missed the last metro and I had to call a cab, I didn’t have the money to pay, so I had to phonecall M. ( who bravely was waiting for me even if it was o1.30 a.m. ) to lend me some money. As she was already wearing her pijamas, seh put the money in a small, chinese-like wallet, and threw it out of the window. The wallet fell on the floor, rolled and rolled and rolled until it reached a small hole in the wall and fell in it as I stared at it incredulous. Sometimes life really surprises you. Sometimes bad luck is just too strong. Some days you’d just stay in bed till the day after.  

In the last few months I’ve been having the strong impression that, somewhere  in Rome, a Stargate must have been unlocked allowing freaks from other galaxies to reach our planet. In the next days I’ll try to provide you a list of my favourite aliens.

The Astracan Grannies (furwearingus mummys) : if you pay attention, you’ll notice that streets, markets and buses have been invaded by these creepy creatures. They’re not very dangerous unless you don’t become an obstacle to their only task, which is to carry all day long heavy flowerpower shoppers from a side to the other of town. Anyway, it’s very easy to spot them if you know that:

- they all are 1.40 mts tall

- they all wear astracan fur coats. Astracan is a kind of mythological sheep with a curly and shiny fur, that is now extinguished (a little like dodos) because in 1920’s someone decided it was “the new mink” and not even the WWF was able to contrast nowadays grannies will to be à la mode.   

- they wear last generation sneakers.

- since their only goal is to bring mysterious shoppers all around the town, you can often find them in the subway or on the bus. Now, when I told you they aren’t dangerous, I also added that they aren’t dangerous unless they don’t perceive you as an obstacle. For example, if you didn’t notice one of them has got on your same bus and you walk towards the only free seat, they could even punch you in the face or throw you out of the bus  in order to win the seat.

Sunday

On Sunday my teenage sister broke up with her boyfriend. That couldn’t sound like a big deal for you, but it’s just because you don’t know what does being engaged when you’re 16 mean, in Bari. When you’ve been dating someone for let’s say, more than one month, you can already consider yourself engaged and this is true especially for teenagers nowadasys. While I still belong to that cute generation of girls who consider a chewed chewingum the most romantic pledge of one’s love and affection, my sister got for the “First Month Anniversaire” an Ipod. Moreover, as you start dating someone, you are automatically introduced to his whole family up to the most ancient granny’s aunt. Even though I’m sure that it doesn’t always work this way, my memories of my Pugliese mother in law still scare me. Maybe she didn’t like the fact I used to get dressed as a flea market had fall on my head, maybe she didn’t like my piercings, maybe she wasn’t very comfortable with the fact that at that time people at school thought I was a satanist, dunno, really. Anyway, I always sensed some kind of negativity coming from her, maybe because she used to meet the nuns ( did I ever tell you I attended a school ran by nuns? creepy people, really, they thought greek and latin till they were 80, after that they would retire in a farm in a village called Noci ( which means Nuts, can you see the beauty of it?) waiting to die….wwwwwh) in the school basement and spend their afternoons preparing Aloe potions and sorting out a way to defeat the devil in me.  

Anyway, being engaged in my hometown is a pain in the ass, and it’s a hard work too, and I guess this is the reason why people get engaged when they are 15 years old and then just get married with the same person. I guess they reckon having an affair it’s easier.

So, now, you can understand why breaking up with V has been such a terrible experience both for my sister and us. Given the fact that I’m the working sister and that she’s the pretty one, we had given for granted that, sooner or later, V would have marry her thus relieving us from the what-the-hell-is-she-going-to-do-when-school-will-be-over? issue.

Now gotta, go, she’s calling me on the MSN messenger for some advices, and I gotta read very careful what is she saying, since the overuse of emoticons make the chat box look like a Picasso painting. God I’m old.