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.

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.

January 1st 2008, 02.00 a.m.

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)

  12. 05 ( Puerta del Sol)

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).  

Day 1 - December 30th 2007, 5 a.m.

We’re going to Madrid for the New Year’s Eve. Since we had to leave at 5 a.m. from Bari airport, I thought it was useless to go to sleep and decided to stay up till 4 with my friends and then go and wake my family up. Look at my face and guess who had the crappiest idea on earth.

So, there we are, ready to go, each one of us bringing those things that couldn’t absolutely be left at home:

Me: camera and cigarettes

Mother: Lonely Planet guide

Fulvio: himself and cigarettes

Sister: life size ugly disney cartoon monster ( boyfriend’s present…looks like we are going to share the bed, the monster, my sister and I) , two ( two !!!) albums of pictures of her boyfriend and her ( Is she afraid to forget the face of her boyfriend during the neverending three days lasting trip ?)

The reason why we had to leave at 5 am is that to go to Madrid straight from Bari we reserved seats on a charter flight.

Charter: special flight that is scheduled when lots of people from the same town go to the same place in particular periods, like Christmas or summer holidays.

Charters from Bari: more or less the same thing but with some slight differences:

1) People from Bari only move in hordes, so the avarage leaving family includes: Mother, Father, three or four ( or five) overweight kids ( if older than 15, you have to add the respective boyfriends and grilfriends), the octogenarian granny ( that the rest of the family always forgets on the plane since it’s too concentrated in remembering the duty free bag) and some more relatives and friends. Leggi il seguito di questo post »