http://www.maison-de-stuff.net/lox/Lox's Blog @ the Maison de Stuff.Mon, 31 Jul 2023 09:51:07 +0100en-ukhttp://backend.userland.com/rss092http://www.maison-de-stuff.net/icons/mdsbutton.jpghttp://www.maison-de-stuff.net/lox/Lox's Blog @ the Maison de Stuff.[Thursday 6th October 2011] I never thought that I could be so upset by the loss of someone that I have never met. It's a strange feeling, something that is shared all over the world by lots of individuals, I can almost feel that. It's a great shame that Steve Jobs had to go so "early" in his life, but wanting to see some positive sides in a very sad loss, at least we can say that we lived to see his work, we lived to see his genius in the making. Not many people can say that lived in the same period of a worldwide acclaimed genius if you think of it. Goodbye Steve./lox/articles/00000549.html[Saturday 2nd July 2011] This was the first time for me to come to Siena to see the Palio, quite strange if you think that this race takes place twice in the year and I live in Florence which is only 40km away from Siena... Anyways since we are trying to catch back on things that I didn't do before, me Gianfranco, Simone (he's from Siena, our "Cicero" for the day) and Melania. There is little to say, we met at 4 PM in Colle Val d'Elsa and we drove to Siena with just one car, the city is packed with people on the Palio days, so parking is impossible. Siena is quite beautiful, they managed to keep it very "medieval", when you enter the centre of town you really step back a few hundred years just by looking at the buildings and streets. We took a nice tour of the city and then we plunged into a massive queue to enter Piazza del Campo, where the race takes place (calling it queue is wrong, it was more of a throng of people wanting to enter the main square). Apparently Piazza del Campo can hold up to 80.000 people, I think that we were not short of that number on the day. There was a bit of waiting, as you have to enter at least 1 hour before the race, but there was a nice parade, and Simone told us all about the race, the history and the craziness that people from Siena go through every year for these races. There are a lot of fistfights the days prior to the race, each horse represents a different area of the city and there are rival "contrade" (quarters) who hate each other a LOT. The main point of the race is making sure that the rival contrada DOES NOT WIN. Nobody cares if you do not win, but if the enemy does it's BAD... Apparently we were quite lucky because the race started immediately, normally it takes a long time, and the "contrada dell'Oca" (goose) won the race. Here is when the fun begins because the people belonging to the quarter start going around the city partying and of course chanting and waving flags and anything that belongs to the "contrada". It also does happen that they stop at the borders of the rival quarter (they do not enter though) just to rub it in even more... :) We went to the contrada dell'Oca to see the party, there are people crying, people happy, people totally drunk. We got some free wine on the street and after a while we moved away, after all we do not really belong to that place so we cannot understand how important for this people is to win something like that. A great day though, I really enjoyed it! /lox/articles/00000548.html[Tuesday 21st June 2011] Well, June most certainly passed in a quick fashion, nothing special to report. Well today there might be glimpse of a start of something potentially huge, but it's really just a probable glimpse, so nothing worth spending millions of words on.../lox/articles/00000547.html[19/20th May 2011] And so it's really finished, the longest trip of my life, in terms of flight time, is finished and I am writing sitting quite uncomfortably at 10000 meters above the Northern Coast of Australia on a Thai Airways (mental note to myself: never book Thai Airways Business Class anymore, on this flight it has been quite shite). the trip is over, as usual it seems yesterday that I landed in Auckland, all jet lagged but curious to see what the fifth continents had to offer. Well I must say that it was a great experience, especially Australia was a place that I really liked thanks also to the clients that are all a bunch of young people so it was great to hang around with them not just for the business side of things. What has this trip left me? More experience I guess, more consciousness of what I did in these 36 years and how much it's worth it. I do realize that in order to relate to my country fellow-man I have been playing down a lot the things I did. It's crazy, getting other people that never met before getting surprised at "the amount of things that you did, but how old are you?". Actually it's not crazy, it's actually a very good thing, it has been a long time since I felt like that. People look at me as a threat sometimes, I can understand it, at least in Italy it's a feeling that I get, abroad it seems that the mind is a little bit more open, although I might be mistaken. In any case I do not care, the trip was great, I feel different and I do not know yet in what, I have seen the 'roos (kangaroos), I have watched AFL matches, I have seen Melbourne and Sydney, the Hunters Valley all great places that I will bring for all my life in my heart. At the moment only in MY heart, but I am working on the other one to share life and experiences with! In any case, here are the pictures, they speak better than me rambling around. Enjoy/lox/articles/00000546.html[Sunday 15th May 2011] So you might wonder how Australia really is. Well to be honest I couldn't tell you as I know this place very little, but I certainly can give you my opinions. Australians are rather friendly and laid back people, I like the fact that there seems to be a lot of politeness going around and lots of people smiling, it makes things a lot smoother and nicer even if you are having a bad day. Melbourne has some "spirit" to it, I like it better than Sydney, although Sydney gets incredible views and panorama. Don't get me wrong also Sydney is great, but Melbourne is the place where I would live. The guys here say that "Melbourne is the woman you marry, while Sydney is the one you have an affair with", I have to say that it's quite close to how I see these two cities. Weather in the winter, which is when I visited, is quite crap, but it's winter after all. The fact that gets me is this image that I have of Australia, always sunny and hot. Well that's a total misleading image, certainly it doesn't get terribly cold like in Europe but they get a cold winter here too, I even had to buy a hat! Food has been great, under that point of view it reminds me of New York, there's a lot of selection, Ozzie wines are great and the several restaurants/bars are really well presented and there are a lot of places with great atmosphere. I'd have to say that the latest bit is more consistent in Melbourne rather than Sydney, but I have only explored the CBD of these two cities. So far that's all, needless to say that I like it here, it could be a country where I could happily live.../lox/articles/00000545.html[Tuesday 10th May 2011] So it is the final day of my stay here in New Zealand, I will post pictures later of course, but all in all it was a very positive trip, both for work and to get a glimpse at how this place is. I cannot say that I have seen a lot, there is a lot that I was not able to check out, but that's quite normal, after all business takes you to the biggest cities and not in the countryside that apparently is the very jewel here in New Zealand. The fact that it's Autumn here doesn't help, I found it very hard to adjust to the weather having left Italy that was bordering between Spring and Summer, so I made a point that if I ever come back here it's going to be around October/November so that I can see what this country has to offer when the weather is nice! Food-wise it's pretty much like England, so nothing special really, but there are a lot of foreign restaurants and the quality of the prime materials is very high so even if I ended up having French, Indian or Italian (yes I had to...) it was rather nice. All in all a place where I'd like to come back to with a bit more time for myself, but for the first time this is more than sufficient!! :) Farewell New Zealand, see you soon!/lox/articles/00000544.html[Monday 25th April 2011] Easter Monday it's a national holiday so today we went with the usual bunch of friends to Greve, a place very well known for it's wine (Chianti was technically born here), but also for the best butcher in the Florence area called Falorni. The day was really pleasant, we ate a lot of great food, saw bits and pieces of Greve and surrounding areas, and generally had fun being together, blessed by a quite summery day (finally I'd say it has been raining at the weekends constantly!!)... I even bought a lot of processed meat (salame, prosciutto and so on) which I am going to eat when I come back from Australia and New Zealand.../lox/articles/00000543.html[Sunday 24th April 2011] There is a tradition in Italy, basically Christmas is a sort of day that you must spend with the family, but Easter you can choose to do whatever you want. In order not to upset the God of Italian traditions, this year I set off to Urbino, a very nice and small medieval city, together with Fabiana and Francesca. Fabiana was with me during the Japanese trip last summer, Francesca is a new addition to my circle of acquaintances, and I have to say a very welcomed one! We set off pretty early as there are more than 2 hours drive to Urbino and eventually got there in the late morning just in time to go grab some lunch in a restaurant that we picked solely upon a recommendation of an old lady that we stopped. Well the food was nice, but not great, still our spirit did not falter and after the mandatory tour of all the attractions of the city we headed back to Florence late in the night. It was a really good day, went by real quick, as normally good days go by! Must do again!/lox/articles/00000542.html[Friday 22nd April 2011] It has been more or less 4 or 5 months that I have started to look seriously for a house to buy. I think that it's one of those experiences that many other people had during their lives, some people even more than once, so in a way it gives me the chance to comply to the society and be stressed yet about another thing that probably stressed many others. I started off with a very easygoing approach: "easy peasy lemon squeezy, I am by myself, how hard can it be to find a decent place?"... Well history says that it is bloody hard, I thought it was going to be much easier to find a nice place to live, I am not looking anything special of course, I am single, and this house doesn't have to be the home of my life. This is a wrong approach, I have soon learnt, because no matter how shitty a hole you want to buy but you will inevitably look at all details and pros and cons with great care. After all the money that you are giving is good, whatever the amount is, and the house cannot be really changed like you change a pair of shoes. So in the end after making and offer for one place (the offer was turned down), I am still on the look. It's really hard work, getting all the appointments, trying to understand if you saw already THAT house (some agents do not post pictures of the flats), rushing away from work to dive yourself into the real estate market having to reason with people that overvalue their properties, just because there is this is how we are taught... Yes, since we are kids, our parents told us that "the house always gains in value", it's a "safe investment"... WRONG! Like any other market it can collapse, but it seems that this part of the Economic theory is not quite grasped by many of my fellow countrymen... And there are Estate Agents... I am sure that there are a lot of professionals, but the ones that I have met, saving from a few ones, are really CRAP. There are people that don't take appointments because they are on a lunch-break (at 14:30 PM!!), people that "it's too late in the evening to see a house at 18:00", people that don't know what they hell they are talking about. Most of them would try to sell something just by adopting the standard technique that you can find in the preface of any salesman "oh, I shown this house to 10 other people yesterday, must make your choice quickly...". IF they only knew that I am in sales myself (fortunately my bullshitting is much higher grade than "be quick because I have another client who's interested..."). Rule N.1 when you buy: ONLY listen to the technical talk, to understand if the person is knowledgeable and knows what he/she's on about. All the rest should be considered "white noise". Anyways, I am getting fed up. I WANT A BLEEDING HOUSE, and cannot find it... Main reason is that I need to move back closer to Florence, my social life is there, I need to go closer to it. And the countryside place is quite great but also very lonely at times, and I am by myself now, so it's not that great to be there... Oh well, keep looking, this afternoon 2 more appointments, I am sure I'll find it, the time has come to be a house owner... Scary.../lox/articles/00000541.html[Saturday 2nd April 2011] The genensis of birthday goes a long way. First of all this year I made a point to be in Italy for my birthday, as usually I am always travelling and I cannot be with my friends or anyone else to have some sort of party... Anyway, I have tried to organize some sort of dinner at my place with the Thai specialities that I brought back from Bangkok, but to my dismay I only got a string of refusals for various reasons... I do not know what bell rang in my head but from Thailand I wrote to them that "in case you are planning some surprise party, DON'T do it"... Ok maybe not in these words but the message was that. Anyways days passed and I woke up today feeling quite uneasy, probably because it seems that I have a cold. Then around 10ish in the morning there was a great deal of noise and commotion outside my hose and there they were, in 3 seconds they were all in the house for this "surprise" that in a way I had predicted, but to be honest I was expecting something "at night" rather than in the morning... Well the plan was to go out for a picnic and come back in the afternoon, all went extremely well despite my cold which did turn down a little my mood, and it was a great surprise party. I even got this little chick as a present, this has a long story behind, so I will not venture in the explanation, but of course it is something that was designed to make fun of me. These are the days when I realize that I am not alone and that I understand what got me back to Florence 5 years ago. I am lucky to have some friends like them, I guess that they all know that recently things haven't been that great, so that made it much a better day than it would have been anyways. Shame that some did not manage to come, but there will be other occasions to party, starting from the next weekend! Thanks everyone who was part of the process even if they couldn't come, I really appreciated! /lox/articles/00000540.html