Rome, Mediterrenean
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J’aime Paris Chapter II: From the floor to the getto
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
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.
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.
Geee
God, I’m tired.
Bad thing about this job, is that there are periods ( not too many, by the way) in which we’re really relaxed, and easy. We can take our time, do a little gossip, have a smoke on the balcony, go grab a coffee, chat a little with our boyfriends on the phone, whatch silly videos on YouTube. And then, all of a sudden, there are days like today. Even if this morning the universe tried to suggest me that I’d better stay home ( while I ws waiting for the bus, a car passed by and splashed a mud puddle on my awesome snow white skirt) when I walked into the office, I felt great. Now I look like I got run over an elephant and the mud staines on my skirt are the cutest thing about me. My hair is puffier than usual, my eyes look like the Simpson’s and I have a Rain-man posture. I think that young, beautiful and smart girls who spend all their day staring at logo on a screen, while talking at the same time with the graphic artist who made it ( and who was my best friend till today, don’t think he’s going to talk to me ever again after I made him change his project ten thousands times and ruined his day), with our Communication Projects responsible ( who couple of times vanished because her brand new apartment got fleed by dunnowhat), and with an algerian guy whose thoughts I couldn’t understand because I do not understand French before 12.00 a.m. , should be protected by WWF, or UNESCO or something like that.
Now I’m kind of worry. I mean, after the first months of enthusiasm, I’m now realizing that I’ve never been to the supermarket, that basically i don’t have a social life and that Devil Wears Prada protagonist can kiss my ass.
Gotta do something about that.
I’ll make a list. Lists are always helpful:
- Go to the supermarket and buy something healthful, like soy, juices and also something that can cheer me up, like cookies and chocolate. Maybe I’ll grab a beer or two as well.
- Wash my clothes before the only clean stuff to put on will be my bikini.
- Buy a socket for my hairdryer, drying my hair on the heater isn’t very nice. In the end I always have burns on my forhead.
- …
Fine, gotta go. My new, organised life is starting now.
A life for rent
It’s sales time, that for a girl who got hired for the first time in her life ( after five years spent working for free ) means the paradise. Too bad that I usually sit behind my desk at 09.30 in the morning and get off at 08.00 p.m., so I can fall in love with the shop windows only platonically and have to keep being dressed up as a stagiaire ( which it’s a metaphore for ”I look completely messed up”). Anyway, saving money isn’t a bad idea either, since I’ve noticed ( and I’m not a finance genius at all, I’m more the goat-for-cow-swap kind of girl) that lately people is getting poorer and poorer ( maybe switching from Liras to Euro wasn’t such a good idea. Now we can wander around Europe as much as we like, but we have no money to go back home…) and have started looking for alternatives. Take a look at the newspapers, the only ones who can still afford a standard lifestyle ( standard: not being obliged to fight with the squirrels for a bunch of acorns in the city park) are those who have been able to give something ( anything) for rent. Of course, who has an apartment, a house, a cave ( please, don’t laugh, caves in Milan are bloody expensive…and romantic, as well, you and your sweetheart could pretend to be Mary and Joseph at Christmas Eve) nowadays can consider himself only a step below Onassis. Anyway, even if you aren’t so lucky, don’t bring yourself down. Just take a look around you: almost everything you own could be useful for someone else. You could buy a webpage, and give the pixels for rent at one dollar each, as in the Million Dollar Homepage . You could give your pet for rent ( please, notice that the renting rates depend from how cool your pet is. You could get more or less 6 euros/hour for your boring boring turtle and about 500 euros/hour for your guitar playing monkey). If you don’t own a pet and you have no idea of 
what a pixel is but you own a huge self-esteem, you could always apply for a job at Lease Your Body and walk around with the latest Big Mac commercial stick on your forhead. I’ve read of people leasing the parking space in front of their house and also of people giving their Granny for rent ( don’t think it’s evil, the sweet old lady probably wouldn’t even notice the difference between her grandchildren and a Bengali family, if it wasn’t for the effects of curry on her digestive system). Anyway, the thing is, if you’re broke and sales are almost over, quit thinking about making a robbery and start leasing!
New Year’s Eve Preyer
Lord, Sweet Lord,
give me the strenght to accept what I cannot change
the courage to change what I cannot accept
and the wisdom to hide the bodies of those I had to kill this morning because I got nerves.
New Year’s Eve – Day 3
Whoo, just got back from the weirdest new year’s eve party of my entire life. As I already said, we couldn’t find a restaurant healthy enough to have a traditional new year’s eve supper, so we just wallked a little around Plaza Real, at last resigned to have just a little jamon ( ham) and a beer, but it soon became clear that it would be a mission as impossible as Tom Cruise’s when he gets hung upisde down like a jamon in some caveau. In the end, as a lighthouse in the cold Spanish night, there it was a small rotisserie called El Rey del Pimiento (Plaza Puerta Cerrada, 4 – Madrid) that lookd open and lively and we hurred inside. As you can see from the pictures above, the place could easily have been the set of The Lord of the Rings, as it was populated by the Spanish Freaks Association and its decor could leave without words even the leader of Kitsch Fanatics Worldwide.
After five minutes, Fulvio had already become waiter Mario’s best friend, while my mother got a little freaked out because of the smoke of cigarettes that occluded the possibility of seeing what we were eating ( croquetas!!!). My sister ( unbelievably still not whining) and I just kept singing our Give me hope remix, hoping some miracle to come and resolve the situation. The miracle came, and was sangria carafe shaped. After that my memories are a little foggy, all I remember is:
- us walking out the Pimiento place giggling
- us buying from the cutest chinese guy three little bags with 12 berries of grape each, to be swallowed at midnight in Puerta del Sol square, together with a bottle of champagne.
- us completely lost in the colorful crowd of Puerta del Sol
- me getting almost choked while trying to eat a berry for each toll of the clock at midnight.
Happy New Year to all of you, folks.
11.15 pm (Sangria Especial)
11.45 pm ( Puerta del Sol)
Nochevieja Madrilena – Day 2
Day 2 – December 31st, 02.00 pm
Well, I’m exhausted. This morning we went out aiming to increase our cultural level by visiting El Prado and Reina Sofia museums and thus to close 2007 a little more cultivated, but the cosmic energy must have decided that we’re cultivated enough, as you can see in the picture below that well summarizes our cultural morning trip in Madrid.
This is it: last day of the year Spanish think they had enough and just don’t go to work. We wandered for three hours ( following beloved Lonely Planet, mother keeping askin: almost there? almost there? almost there?) looking for something – anything - to see: El Prado was closed, Reina Sofia Art Center was closed, Royal Palace was closed, shops were closed, my feet were hacking and my stomach was starting to digest me from the inside. We decided it could be a good idea to have a little rest in a super nice quarter, called Chueca, have lunch and then decide what to do. Of course we didn’t tell Fulvio Chueca is Madrid gay quarter, so I think he is still convinced Spanish people are just friendly with Italian wine bar owners. We got into a very nice Cervezeria, and that was the best idea of the morning, cause, since it was a Cervezeria, it didn’t have a wine list that Fulvio can memorize, so it took only five minutes to ask for ( guess what?) cerveza y croquetas ( my liver is very much mad at me) and our first Italian-tasting coffee ( Italian espresso in Spanish = cafe solo, I know that because the waitress was from Brindisi ( 40 km from my home town) so we could ask her the meanings of the dishes in the list, but I had the impression she didn’t understand them neither).
Culturally enriching information: Fulvio, who must have lived in Spain when he was younger ( dunno for sure, his past is a little foggy) explained us that the dirt on the floors of every cervezeria, restaurant and wine bar we’d been in, is proportional to the fame of the place. It’s pretty easy, actually: lot of success= lot of people = lot of dirt on the floor. Now I understand why I saw couple of times waiters throwing waste on the floor. That was marketing. Cool.
After a little tour to the Atocha train station ( the one in wich there was the terrositic attack on March 11th 2004), that has now become an indoor rainforest ( you could expect a monkey to pickpocket you all of a sudden), we started looking for a restaurant to greet the Last Day of the Year from. It’s useless to tell you that the same philosophy that made Spanish people decide to have a rest in the very only day we were there was applied to restaurants, bars, bistrots, cervezerias and post houses the Lonely Planet suggested, and the few ones that were open ( we didn’t miss any of them…almost there? almost there? almost there?) of course had something that made my mother change her mind about ten thousand times. There you are a list:
- Cheap menu
- Cheap restaurant
- Cheap table place in nice restaurant
- Unappealing waitress
- Don’t like the way the barman was staring at my sister
- Don’t like the material the tables are made of
- Don’t like the way the table is set
- Don’t understand the menu
In the end none of the place we visited was good, and we went back to the hotel a little concerned about our destiny ( Mother in a nihilistic attitude, Fulvio not caring about it, Sister and I singing at the top of our lungs a remixed version of Give me hope, Joana and Feliz Navidad). On the way to the hotel, we had a little tour in El Corte Inglés, a huge Galeries Lafayette and Harrod’s looking shopping center, that was surprisingly open.
Now, as I told you, I care very much about signs. If this last day of 2007 is a metaphore of the old year that is coming to an end, well, there are a few word to describe it:
- feet ache
- useless wandering
- nerves increasing
Hope the next one will be just a little better ( at least no more feet ache).
