Rome, Mediterrenean
Organizzatrici di risse interculturali di altissimo livello - Top level intercultural fights organizersArchivio per Febbraio, 2008
J’aime Paris, Chapter II - To Delhi and back
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.
From Paris to San Remo
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.
Springtime
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.
Stargate
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.
Murphy’s Law or Weekend in Bari - Episode 2
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.
J’aime Paris: some more things to do in Paris
There you are some more things to do, while sticking around with your sweethearth ( or some pals) in Paris.
Tourist-whatching @ Les Tuileries
If the sun is shining, and your feet hurt after you’ve pretended to be cultivated at the Louvre, you can grab a chair and sit in the Tuileries Gardens doing a little tourist-whatching. My favourite ever is the middle-aged man that has forgot to uncover his camera, and tries in vane to make pictures. Look at him: he stares at his beloved digital reflex shaking softly his head, while his wife makes some shy attempts to point with her fat finger the cover and then - after being kindly asked by her beloved to shut the fuck up - gives up and enjoys the scene. The situation reaches its apex when he starts pushing ( first gently, then with increasing anger) no matter which button of the camera. In the end, about a hour an a half later, he’ll realise what happened but it would be too late: his wife had fall in love with a gardener and ran away and the statues of the Tuileries had gone out for dinner.
Medical intercultural exchange
If you belong to that cathegory of people that think that using subway in such a awesome town is a pity and enjoy walking for kilometers to an arrondissement to the other, maybe your sweethearth don’t. Carelessly, I made mine walk for about 25 kms and, as a result, by the end of the day, his right foot tendons gave up and went on strike. Even though someone could find interesting hanging around with a 2 metres tall guy that walks like Dr House. I don’t. Even though he was really nice and didn’t complain at all, when at last he shew me his foot he looked like he had a tennis ball underneath his skin, so we decided to go to the pharmacy. The pharmacist was a tiny winy 100 years old chinese woman who, after I explained in French the pathology that affected my other side of the bed saying something that sounded more or less like this: ” He, foot,walked a lot, meatball, foot, paste?”, disappeared for couple of minutes and came back smiling and handing me a pedicure chinese device. I thanked her very much and ask for a paste for contusions.
Even if I massaged with all my love the injured foot until my hands started to smell like my granny’s cupboard, the morning after the foot had turned blue. My beloved behaved very bravely all day long ( who said that Italians are Mamma’s Boys?) but I guess that the stairs till the Sacre Coeur were a little too much so we decided to look for an Occidental pharmacy and fix the problem. In the meanwhile I’d studied a more decent way to explain the problem, so I walked very confidently towards the Santa-looking pharmacist, that listened very politely to me, as I explained the problem better than House itself would have done. Then he handed me a paste that looked like a haemorrhoids medicinal. I guess it has been then that my boyfriend had for the first time his word on the situation and said: Hun, before someone tells us that I’d better put some eye drops to heal my foot thus forcing me to crush this pharmacy, please, let’s go.
J’aime Paris - episode 1: Things to do in Paris
When your phone conversations with your boyfriend ( who lives far away from you in crappy Milan) get a little too formal ( formal it’s for example when you close the conversation with “Best Regards”) and you can’t remember the last time you’ve seen him in person ( and not on MSN webcam that makes everyone look like a Star Wars’ character) it’s time for a love trip in Paris.
I won’t tell you Paris is super romantic. I won’t tell you Paris is super French and people really do walk around with a baguette under their armpit. I won’t tell you that every time I see Notre Dame I start whistling the main theme of Notre Dame - the musical, embarassing my boyfriend to death. You already know that, if you’ve been in Paris or if you’ve read no matter which Lonely Planet guide. French territorial marketing professionals have done a really good job in the last 200 years, because French stereotypes are almost stronger than Italian spaghetti-pizza-mandolin (who in the name of the lord plays the mandolin,anyway?).
What I would really share with you are some trip advices that could really help you out during your romantic trip in Paris:
DOs
1) Take a Bateau Mouche and look at Paris from the Seine:
walking along the shores of the river, there are plenty of these open deck boats. With a 7 euros ticket, you can seat on little green plastic chairs conceived for dwarves, freeze your ass out and scream “OOOOOOOOOHhhhhhh” and “AAAHHHHhhh” in chorus with other tourists when, all of a sudden, the Tour Eiffel appears right in front of you. (MM St. Michel)
2) Experience new French Philosophy @ Jardins de Luxembourg :
lovely thing about Paris is that every city park provides you for free very comfy chairs you can just grab and put wherever you want. Our French friend C. invited us for a great pic nic at Luxemburg Gardens. He brought very French chees and patés and wine, and there we layed, chatting and giggling for the whole afternoon around a big fountain, right in front of the Senate. You know what? Since the arrival of Sarko, French people have started Sarkoing as well. They are more relaxed, they take their time, they don’t give a damn. I thing I could get easily accostumed with that. Maybe I was born to live in Paris.
3) Fall in love with Alexandre
If you wanna eat the best Fondue Bourgignonne ever but you don’t want to be annoyed by thousands tourists, then Alexandre is the place for you. It is a super tiny restaurant in the hearth of Latin Quarter and it worths the visit because its owner ( Alexandre) is hot, young and super funny ( my mother fell in love with him three years ago and he’s still on her mind) and because it has an “all you can eat” 15 euros combo consisting in: fondue bourgignonne ( wich is raw meet that you cook in hot oil ), salad and awesome butter potatoes I could kill for. The decor of the restaurant has been bought in a flea market, you eat at candlelight and, when you pay, they give you a lollipop. Check it out, your boyfriend will love it for the meet is very tasty…and you’ll love it too.
