Amsterdam 2007

Such an amazing city!! I fell in love with it...
Not many photos taken I am afraid (the insides of the coffeeshops are not really famous for being good places where to take pics :) but here are a few.

Chaharshanbe suri

Waiting for the new Iranian Year that will start next Wednesday, we said farewell to the last Wednesday of the year 1385 last week with a wonderful dinner at a traditional Iranian restaurant, Behesht, not far from where I live. The food was simply amazing (mental note, go back there again) and the portions of a kind it's difficult to find in London... This, and the traditional atmosphere of the restaurant accounted for a really fascinating experience.
I realised I don't know much of Iran (when I first arrived here I though they speak arab there, shame on me...), a place with a great history and wonderful people.
Not that I understand what's happening now under Ahmadinejad, but I really want to learn more about the country and maybe go there one day...

We ended the night leaping over the fires as they still do in Iran (although we had to bend the tradition to three little lights :).... It was a great night!

St. Patrick's day

Ireland crushed us in the 6 Nations yesterday... so what is better than a good pint of Guinness to recover from the debacle?? Although we had to drink it outside because the pub was full for the Wales-England match, Guinness is always a pleasure! Well done to Ireland (and to Wales, that defeated England!! ;) Happy St. Patrick's Day!! (ah, the number of exclamation marks in this post is not correlated, in any way, to the number of pints I had!!!!)

Gin a body...

Certe cose le faccio solo dopo un paio di pinte... sto diventando come gli inglesi che non riescono a esperimersi se non c'e' dell'alcol nel raggio di 2 metri, o forse in realta' sono sempre stato cosi..
Serata al pub, tranquilla, niente di che.
Faccio due chiacchere con una ragazza con cui non parlo di solito e viene fuori che e' davvero una tipa in gamba. Figo, bello. Fine della cosa (ma siccome ve lo state chiedendo, si, e' pure carina :). Vado per tornare a casa che la mattina dopo dovevo essere in lab alle 8.30... e lei mi abbraccia all'improvviso. Ecco sai quei momenti in cui ti rendi conto che ti mancava da un po di tempo un bell'abbraccio? Uno di quei momenti. Mi si e' come sciolto qualcosa dentro (e' che sono sentimentale maledizione..) e ho ricambiato l'abbraccio, forte. L'ho pure baciata in fronte, prima di accorgermi che il suo enorme ragazzo stava a meno di mezzo metro da me.... mah...

"Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the rye,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need a body cry?

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the glen,
Gin a body kiss a body,
Need the warl' ken?

Gin a body meet a body
Comin thro' the grain;
Gin a body kiss a body,
The thing's a body's ain."

London is a state of mind

Still struggling with a definition of London. Probably there is no need to define it at all. But I can't help myself from doing it. It must be the flu...

So, my idea is that London is only a state of mind. Nothing more than an idea.

I'll try to explain: if you look at the stats you find that London has something like 7.5 millions inhabitants, a few thousands interesting buildings, museums, pubs.
That's way more than what our brain can take and understand in one go. In a smaller city you can get to know a significative proportion of the people who are living there, know how they think, walk through almost all the streets at least once, know where all the important buildings are. This allows you to define the nature of that city as something different from you, as something detached, indipendent.
I found impossible to do the same with London: it's just above my capacity for a definition. Every day I find something different that I didn't know was there, I hear of a new museum, I know someone new, I walk in a new road, my sense of orientation lost. It can be exhilarating and confusing at the same time.
And since I can't give London a definition indipendent from myself, the feelings I have for it change every day, depending on my frame of mind, my thoughts, depending on what happened two hours before, depending on the weather (oh yes.. a lot! :).
It's like a gigantic wizard hat that can satisfy your curiosity if you feel curious or feed your fears if you feel insecure, make you meet new people if you feel like it, protect you from new encounters with the sheer number of the people which pass in front of you every day.
It is just endless exploration, endless possibilities.
It may be that I am the only one feeling this way but it was something that struck me when I first arrived. The more I know London the more I like this city, even though I gave up on the idea of know it (her?) completely.
So is London real? Yes, of course, but in my opinion it is just as real as we are.

ps yeah yeah, I know, it must be the flu.... ;)

Web 2.0

Things are changing... more quickly than expected. A year ago I wasn't thinking of setting up a blog, a year ago I didn't know about YouTube. It's weird, now there is so much information around that we can't cope with the pace at which this information is released. And at the same time it's so accessible. Unorganized, chaotic information like in YouTube, or unlimited organized offer as the one that will be available from projects like Joost (same guys that designed Skype btw...). Almost every single piece of information is a few milliseconds from you, from every corner of the planet. This means, at least for me, that we have to rethink the way we define knowledge and information. And this means we will end up rethinking a lot of things in our lives. Uhm...

Festivals

Basically, they are usually three to five days of chaos, huge tent camps, no showers, weather that can be either so hot that you end up thinking that beer can be drunk warm (wrong, wrong, wrong) or so rainy that you end up in a puddle of mud. But they are also the best possibility you have to enjoy a lot of good music in the same place and meet an awful lot of people.
Basically, I can't wait to go to another one... (last year we went to the Isle of Wight festival...)
The big thing this year is Glastonbury, no doubt about it.
But I'm not quite sure that it's also the best choice:
1 145 quid of ticket...
2 no idea of who is going to play before the tickets go on sale...
3 mandatory registration a month before the start the selling of the tickets...

Other people suggested Werchter: Kaiser Chiefs, Bjork, Muse, Artic Monkeys, Pearl Jam, The Kooks, Metallica, Faithless, Beastie Boys, Incubus, The Chemical Brothers. 160 euro and the festival is in Belgium but friends that have been there last year told me it was really well organized so.... I'm tempted..

I'm not sure yet, especially since I'm trying to save money to travel this summer (yes yes I say this every spring and then I never go anywhere but this is the right year, I can feel it ;), I'll probably end up doing the registration for the big thing and then decide at the last minute, as usual...
But, hey, it's festival season, doesn't it smell already like summer?