Whatever can go wrong will go wrong,

 and at the worst possible time,

in the worst possible way

Saturday

I went back to my hometown ( Bari, south of Italy, right in the heel of the boot, just in case you didn’t know) for the weekend. In the avarage stereotype, the weekend at your parents’ is a golden time when you basically are feed, dressed and hugged all day long. Well, in the beginning it actually worked this way. I spent a beautiful Saturday with my mother: we had breakfast in a super awesome coffee shop, then we went shopping ( I bought my 20th pair of boot. Maybe I should stop, but they costed only 15 euros, can you believe it? How couldn I leave them all by themselves on that crappy shelf? ), then we went to a beauty farm and did sauna and a relax massage. For dinner we went out to a very nice bio restaurant and had smoked salmon, and angus steak, and an awesome slice of orange flavoured cheescake. Can you image a better day? I can’t. After such a perfect day I decided to go out for a beer with my best friend D. and his girlfriend so I drove with my mom’s car till D’s and then we went downtown with his car looking for the rest of the gang. After half a pint I was ready to go to sleep, but I parked my car at D’s, and so I had to wait 01.00 p.m. before reaching it. I love driving back home at night, smoking my last cigarette and singing my head out listening to Virgin radio. Everything is nice and calm as I drive coasting the sea. As I drove across the rails and turning right to reach my street, I realised all of a sudden that a car was driving against me reaching 200 km/h speed and with its lights turned off. I sheered desperatly trying to avoid the impact, thus ending up in a flower bed and scratching my mom’s car against a wall. I tried to explain my mother that she should be happy because her beloved daughter is safe, but I’m pretty sure that, if it wasn’t for the insurance, she’d lovingly kill me.  

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.

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.

Good thing about life, it’s that it surprises you in ways you couldn’t even imagine.  Im my last post I wrote about this communication experiment, that consisted in “fishing” web perverts with tags about Italian Big Brother’s transgender participant and then count how many of them ended up in a blog about Mediterranean culture looking for something juicy.  Well, I must admit they’ve been pretty much, but there’s no wonder in that. Jerks’ mother is always pregnant, as we say around here.

However, in doing this little experiment, I had to check frequently the Search Engine Terms thing, which is a window that makes a real time report of through what kind of search people end up in your blog. Among all of the transgender hunters there was one query that really surprised me: “How do people from Rome look like”.

Now, we have the chance to do a job that makes us overcome every kind of stereotype ever invented, as we meet every day people from all over the world thus having the opportunity to know how they really are, beside the Coran, the veil and the couscous. What I mean, is that we learn to classify people in “nice”, “funny”, “jerks”, “idiots”, “good workers”, “bad workers”, “bad breath”, “aweful shoes”, “can’t understand a word of what he/she’s saying”, “sleeping beauty”, “retard”, “hunk”  indipendently from the Country they come from or the God they worship. I mean, If I take a look over my laptop, I’d see the funniest and sweetest  girl  ever ( but I’d better don’t stare at her too much, since every time I look at her she makes the printer fall, or tries to feed me with bananas saying I’d better eat a little more fruit. She’s some mix between the Tazmanian Devil and my mother and that scares me) . Her name is F, and I notice that  she’s a muslim only when it’s Ramadan and she starves while the rest of us sips regardlessly hot chocolate. Well, I guess that our point of view towards the “others” doesn’t represent the avarage’s, but anyway. If someone feels the need to search the web to find how do Romans look like, that could mean that:

- He has never read Asterix. Real Romans still look like Centurioni, beside the fact they don’t wear those feathery helms anymore  nor those nice steel skirts, and that’s a pity, because some Romans have really nice legs though a little hairy. Well, they could always wax, couldn’t they? They speak like Centurioni (putting an e at the end of every word: bar = bare, tram=tramve yes= yesse), they stomp on your feet in the subway like Centurioni surely did, they are rude, loud and during Sunday football match they would be able to kill a bull with their bare hands if the referee acts unfairly.

- He has never seen 60’s movies: Romans are handsome, swim in the fountains with Anita Heckberg, drive Vespas and slap in the face people on trains.

- He has never seen The Gladiator: Romans look like bitchy Australian actor and, before doing something very annoying ( like fighting against lions), they always grab some dust from the floor. For this reason Roman’s wives are very happy, because they don’t have to clean up the house: the dustier, the better.

The thing is, that we still need stereotypes to understand the world around us, even if we don’t even have to make any effort in creating them: the world changes faster, things are getting more and more confused, and Media help us out in organising our knowledge. Now I gotta go, I’ve plenty of things to do: wearing my Armani coat, driving to the Pizzeria with my Vespa, drink wine with friends and maybe play a little my mandolin.

“It seems we swapped weather with Europe!”
Ziad, Damascus

“Thank you for the warm regards, we really need them in the snowy and cold weather we have now in Jordan!”
Victoria, Amman

by Zainab Hamoud

M.

This post ain’t about Gf (Big Brother)8 trasgender participant (beautiful-lady-Bambi-eyes-super-smart-much-more-womanish-than-me-screw-her called Silvia). If you ended up on this post lookin for her, well, too bad for you. This post is in fact a serious meta-communication experiment. There is a nice tool called BlogStats, on WordPress, that mainly tells you how many clicks does your blog get every day, and which Tags ( which is the XXI millenium name for “keywords”) are the most frequently searched in the Net.  Checking out my BlogStats I found out that the second “top post” ever has been M’s one on the Italian Big Brother new ( and suprisingly smarter than usual) participants. Deepening the research, it came out that tags such as “GF” “Transgender” were often associated, in the websearch, to words such as “transgression”, “easy” and stuff like that.

So my little experiment will mainly consist in publishing this post, that says nothing at all about GF8 nor about transgenders, with the same tags M used for her post. After that I’ll just wait and check the BlogStats every two hours and let you know.

Now, you may think I’ve got nothing to do. From your point of view it could seem true.  I work for an association that gathers Radio and TV broadcasters from all over the Mediterranean and links them in the organisation of conferences, co-productions, festivals and so on. My job mainly consists in making sure that all of them are able to fly from their hometown to the place an  event is taking place (let’s say, Bucharest) and that they can enter the Country the event is settled in ( let’s say Romania) without being arrested for lack of Visa. After that I have to make sure they have a place to sleep in, one to eat at ( possibly not the same) and, sometimes, act a little like an idiot to make them laugh ( for example singing Adriano Celentano’s “Azzurro” in a restaurant in Alexandria, while wearing silly phones with a microphone as I was Britney Spears).  

In the last days I’ve been waiting to know if I gotta go to Romania and fight in person with Howard Jonhson’ General Manager for the bloody room release policy, after I’ve already spent last week doing that on the phone ( but in the end I guess that staring him in the eye and miming what i mean could help, since I’ve tried badly to let him understand me in english with no success and looks like Rumanian general managers have serious problem with the subject-verb-object concatenation).

Now, the thing is that my colleagues and I make every day huge efforts to make people understand the richness and the beauty of this Mediterranean enlarged world we live in. This blog as well is about that, and the idea that it has been visited mainly by jerks looking for sum hot stuff about Big Brother transgender, drives us nuts.

For this reason, this post is a very serious experiment about the avarage IQ of this blog’s visitors. I’m afraid to know the results. I’ll let you know.

“La casa non è un gioco”. Con questo slogan, un gruppo di giovani – pare appartenenti alla Fiamma Tricolore – ha preso di mira e danneggiato la “bolla” trasparente del Grande Fratello allestita a Ponte Milvio, a Roma, per il lancio dell’edizione 2008 (lunedì scorso, 21 gennaio) del Big Brother  in salsa italiana. In quella bolla erano stati rinchiusi, per un paio di giorni, tre candidati-concorrrenti in ballottaggio per l’ingresso. L’assalto ad una bolla…un’impresa donchisciottesca. Una guerriglia ancor più improbabile poiché condotta sul terreno  stucchevole e mediatizzato del Ponte dei Lucchetti.
Ma lo slogan mi intriga. La casa, anche quella del Grande Fratello, in effetti non è (solo) un gioco. Anche per chi non lo ritiene luogo di interessanti esperimenti antropologici, questo reality sicuramente amplifica modalità e messaggi, sdogana personaggi e comportamenti. E li serve alla tavola del pubblico famelico (la serata di apertura ha toccato punte di share del 44%…)
Quello che c’è lì dentro in qualche modo ci riguarda, anche se non ci rispecchia. E soprattutto non ci piace. E allora ben venga se gli (anacronistici) ever green del coatto romano, della bonazza napoletana, di Mamma Carmelina e Papà Filippo quest’anno sono accompagnati da un giovane barista brasiliano, un affascinante e poliglotta ingegnere libanese e una truccatrice transessuale risolta e serena. Dopo edizioni un po’ troppo sopra le righe, dove volgarità e ignoranza riempivano il vuoto di storie e personalità, quest’anno l’impressione è che si sia optato per un mix umano più garbato e sano, in cui la componente “altra” e “trasgressiva” è meravigliosamente normale.
La timidezza del brasiliano, l’eleganza e i congiuntivi perfetti del libanese e il sorriso pacato e materno del transessuale: in questo paese ancora imbrigliato in facili stereotipi, questi sono gli elementi davvero trasgressivi dello show 2008. E per quanto mi riguarda - vénghino, vénghino, Ladies and Gentlemen!! - il milanese simpatico!
M.

A week ago we went to the movies to whatch a film M. had heard about. She’d kept telling me about that all the way from the office to the cinema, so as we bought the tikets I was dying to see that. It was while I was buying pop corn ( so what? It’s corn, it’s healthy, it’s like bloody corn flakes, it’s not like junk food. I don’t do junk food. Not very often, anyway) that we realized the film we intended to whatch was called “Cous Cous” while the film we were going to whatch was called “Caramel”, of the Lebanese Nadine Labaki. Well, guess what? It was beautiful. We spent our night in the cosy atmosphere of a beauty salon where the lives of  women cross and melt like the sugar they use to do the wax. 

The movie is settled in Beyrouth, but it’s not about Beyrouth. The women protagonists belong to the arab world, but there is no anger, nor politics, nor Coran it. It could be anywhere, because the relationship between those women are universal, as women relationships always are. So bravo, to this young ( and gorgeous) film maker whose levity has been already prized with a candidation for Oscars 2008, bravo cause she proved that Europeans ain’t the only one who are able to make a sweet, sensual movie about women.      

Italians are funny. This is the reason why we still are in the EU, it’s cause we make you all laugh. The latest joke is that our Justice Minister’s wife got arrested ( Ironic, hein? Alanise Morrisette would have wrote an entire album about us) and so our Government is now falling apart ( I’m astonished, things like that never happen here). 

Now, in these days I realized something that really upsat me. French people - who probably found very hard to accept to be defeated during Soccer World Champioships, ah ah ahahahahahahah - is now trying really hard to gain the supremacy in the “Funniest Country Ever World Competition”. Well, I must admit. There can be no competition. You win. If it wasn’t for the little blue-eyed dwarf and his romantic love story, I really wouldn’t know what to read when I’m at the toilet ( you know, even Italian politics ain’t that moving, involving and absolutely useless). Now I know how many times do the French Romeo and Juliet caugh in a day, I know that they went to Pyramids ( and so did I…so what?), I know that Carla is pregnant ( pyramids weren’t that interesting in the end, were they?) and, most of all, I know that the President’s former wife thinks that her ex-husband is, I quote: “A useless fucker”.

Well, this is really funny, I must admit. Anyway, since irony will be the only thing that will save us, our comedians are doing their best ( I can’t wait to hear next Berlusconi’s joke, I’m sure it’s coming…): there you are the amazing portait our beloved Fiorello made of our/their a little less beloved Carla.

Enjoy.

Sometimes it happens that I feel all day long as I had walked on a dog poo with my brand new ( ways too expensive for my budget) shoes. Dunno if you recognize the sensation of being in a world that looks exactly like yours, but where everything is a little more annoying than usual not to be noticed. The feeling I’m talking about is the one you experience when you listen to the news, and there is not even the littlest “who cares” news to laugh about. It’s when the hugest woman you’ve ever seen stands right in front of the bus door and doesn’t let you out, so you miss your stop and get to the office too late to drink a coffee before starting a working day. It’s when someone you really love says something you didn’t expect from him/her, not something really unpleasent, but still.  It’s when you start looking at yourself struggling in the world from the outside, as you were in a ’60s videogame or in a candid camera. It’s when your laugh stretches a little too much towards a sigh. You cannot really complain about all this, because people starve and die everyday, but still you know it’s a pain in the ass. Maybe the world is falling apart. Maybe apocalypse it’s coming. Maybe it’s only that my periods are about to come.