Wow! In this post I described a strange spice that a Shilpa brought me from India some months ago.  Back there I didn’t know much about it, just that it’s good with tea. In fact I didn’t even know the name, thanks to zreen for telling me!

Today I googled for that name and found that can be used to heal bronchitis, is an expectorant and can be used in general to alleviate lung infections. Cool, this is exactly what I needed and I have plenty of it at home!  I’m definitely going to use it a lot in these days.

Thanks Shilpa, zreen and patrick!

No, I’m not at the concert of Depeche Mode in Bologna, even if I would love to be there.   Michele had bought a ticket for me, but I had to ask him to find someone else.  In fact he had no problem, it took him 20 minutes to confirm he had found a back up.

No, I’m not at the dinner of the acting course (did I tell you I’m now studying how to act?), even if this is the 1st dinner, called on purpose to better know each other and blend together and the other participants are all women and pretty and fun.  It is an “everybody brings something” dinner and I had prepared some specialties from the traditional Ferrarese cuisine that I’m very fond of.

I’m currently at home, idling, bored.  Unfortunately caught a flu and I have had fever and general sickness in the last 4 days.  Let’s try to find a positive side of the coin.  It was long time I didn’t have that much spare time – you can clearly see from how slow I have been posting new articles to this blog.

In the last few days days I watched some movies, caught up on some RSS feeds, including blogs of my friends, posted a lot of nonsense to facebook and added some info to my profile, listened to some music, reordered paper stuff, hacked some code for the fun of it, overslept, and also worked (email, some phone calls, a few skype chats).  In fact I can’t seem to be able to detach from the office.  At least I’m enjoing the new home (did I tell you I moved to a new flat?).

Last weekend we celebrated the bachelor party for one of our friends. People usually organize late-at-night bachelor parties in dancing places, but we picked him up at his home Sunday morning at 8:30am, saying we had to drive a long way before getting to the place. He was then blindfolded, confused with earphones and loud music and brought in the countryside a few minutes out of the city center where half a dozen warriors were waiting for us, all dressed up in military camouflage, guns and all sorts of strange equipment.

The guys looked like real professionals while they tied to a tree our unaware friend. One of them was actually a lady and she started to talk equivocally to him, who at this point was severely puzzled and beginning to sweat. She then abruptly took out the blindfold and he instantly found himself right in front of an unfriendly berserker wearing a Friday 13th mask, screaming like crazy and ordering ready-set-fire to a firing-squad. The squad shot for real, a few dozen bullets. Of course they were innocent small plastic bullets, 6mm diameter, a quarter gram, but our friend was shocked none the less. After a few seconds he got what happened and cursed at us, who were laughing it up. Now that’s a surprise!

We were in a softair camp. Softair is a battle simulation with fake guns shooting small plastic balls by way of an electric air pump. Those guns are actual size and weight and look very similar to the real thing. When you get hit but one of those bullets it hurts a little and you instantly scream “stop it!”. Of course you need special glasses and/or mask to protect your eyes, cause bullets would be dangerous if they hit you there. It turns out the guys meet there every Sunday morning to play fake fights and even make tournaments with nearby clubs.

Of course we took the opportunity to play with them. They lent us guns and we split in two squads, fighting a few capture the flag matches. The playing field was a former motocross track, with plenty of dunes, trenches, wooden ramps and enough trees and bushes to hide behind. After a few hours I had mud everywhere but it’s been lots of fun. Finally, we changed our dress and moved to a nearby trattoria where we had meat and wine until everybody was stuffed.  What a day!

This weekend I went with Fabio and Michele hiking on the mountains. I love hiking but it was quite some time I didn’t go, so I was a bit excited. Our target was Scaffaiolo lake (1775m), a place on the Appennini mountains between Modena and Pistoia, in the Frignano Natural Park area. The plan was to drive to hut Capanno Tassoni (1317m) and then walk up hill from there.

We weren’t equipped with complex stuff, in particular no crampons and no ice axes, so Michele called the hut’s caretaker to check for weather and snow conditions. Luckily enough, we were told there was some snow around 1500m but nothing difficult. My equipment was: a bottle of water, a couple sandwiches, one apple, some chocolate, a compass, a map, Aku boots, a waterproof wind-stopper jacket, hat, sunglasses.

Once we got to Capanno Tassoni – around 10am – we wore boots, reviewed the map, checked everything and started to walk uphill on trail CAI415, heading to Croce Arcana pass (1680m). Initial landscape was green forest. As expected, after a while we found ourselves walking over snow, but nothing too difficult. Luckily enough, my trousers turned out to be mostly snow-proof and the weather was warm enough so the thin jacket was sufficient.

In 80 minutes we made it to the pass. Up there you find no tree at all, just thin grass, and the pass is at the ridge on the border between Emilia Romagna and Toscana so the wind flows strong and steady moving between the two sides of the Appennini chain. A little cross and a military monument with a pair of howitzers mark the place. From there we switched to trail CAI00, that is walking east-bound on the ridge. The top of the mountains was mostly clean, probably because the south slope is more exposed to the sun and maybe also because of the stronger wind, so the walk was definitely easy with the added bonus of an awesome 360 degrees view on the surrounding valleys. Believe it or not, there were people jogging and cycling over there.

Moving forward we climbed mount Spigolino (1825m), rested a bit on the top and finally reached Lake Scaffaiolo (1775m) at 1pm, just on time to taste a big slice of hand-made blueberry cake at Rifugio Duca Degli Abruzzi. Good! Lake Scaffaiolo is a strange water basin on the top of the mountain. The ridge splits in two parallel lines and rain water (and melting snow) accumulate in the middle, forming a thin lake (just 2.5m deep). At least twenty people were there, resting, sunbathing, playing with their dog, having lunch, wetting their feet in the lake.

We tried to go down though trail CAI401 but bad signals hidden by snow made us get it wrong, so after some off-track we ended up on trail CAI333. No problem, the path was beautiful anyway and through CAI335 we quickly joined CAI401 in Cingio Ermidiano. At that point the weather got really warm. I had to undress to a simple t-shirt. From there we followed CAI401 to Della Riva pass and finally we took CAI445 back to Rifugio Tassoni. We walked 6h30 in total: whoa!

Few days ago I’ve been at the Madison Square Garden, arguably the world’s most famous arena. New yorkers simply call it The Garden, as if it were the only garden out there, or worse, as if it were a garden at all! Well, actually it’s not even on Madison Square. Thanks to wikipedia I discovered the current name is just a legacy from the original arena, that one century ago used to be located in a garden at Madison Square.  Anyhow entering the arena is impressive: you feel like getting into a temple, a place where people go to worship their idols. Oh wait, that’s exactly what they do there!

The show on stage was a basketball match in the College Hoops league, between St. John’s and Pittsburgh. I went with Carla, a friend from New York. She likes college basketball and taught me all I had to know and something more, e.g. that college teams usually have the name of an animal (Pittsburgh Panthers) but St. John’s is an exception (they call themselves the Red Storm). We took the obligatory beer (that they served us with a built-in pretzel) and brought it in.

Before the match started an actual singer sung the national anthem, everybody standing, hats off. Pitts were much stronger and they easily blew out St. John’s 81-57, but it’s been fun anyway. The home team had cheerleaders, dancers and a fanfare band and shot t-shirts to the public during time-outs. Much fun!

Too bad I’m already back to Italy.

Merry Christmas and happy new year to all of my friends!

The title is a tentative translation from an Italian song by Elio e le storie tese, one of my favorite when I was a teen-ager. We’re two days from Christmas and I should be busy wishing happiness and merriness to all of my friends, but this year there’s a different feeling. It’s that kind of tension and uncertainty you get when you go to the beach and there are heavy clouds, announcing some possible storm. You get busy thinking to B plans and even if the clouds end up disappearing your leisure time has been ruined. It’s not me. Lately several prominent newspapers wrote about the unhappy Italian mood and I’m surprised by how precisely they painted it. Apparently, even friends that moved abroad feel the same.

So I’ve been to Matteo and Flavia’s wedding, and it’s been amazing. The wedding was on Saturday night. I got to Vitória the same day and spent half the afternoon by the pool on the roof of our hotel, together with the groom (meanwhile the bride was relaxing in a spa), then we dressed up and 7pm went to the place. No church, just a restaurant organized as a ceremonial room, with a small ritual table in the middle of several dinner tables. No grand-pa/mas in sight. Just the four parents and about fifteen pairs of uncle-aunts. Average age was in the 30-35 range. Men were dressed with a dark suit, while ladies had a long soirée dress. Lots of ladies. Gorgeous.

Everybody was sit down when the bride arrived and as soon as she entered the room, revealing to the crowd, we all stood up, silent, staring at her. No march, just a romantic song. No claps. Just admiration. Then the priest talked about 40 minutes, in Portuguese. I didn’t understand much, but I got that he wasn’t reading or following a pre-defined phrasebook, as Roman Catholics do. He just described what was flowing out of his heart, like somebody would do to make sure his two friends are doing the right thing and are conscious of the meaning of that act. After the ceremony, we had dinner, buffet, with some fried local specialties, sushi and beer, and finally everybody went to the floor dancing. No samba, just modern dance music, like Disco Inferno and the likes.

The next day most of us went to the bride’s father’s house for a churrasco party on the pool side. Unfortunately we Italians had to leave in the middle of the party in order not to miss our flight back to Rio.

It’s been very different than what I imagined, and I liked a lot as it was. By the way, Vitória is a lovely place.

Last summer in Haarlem (The Netherlands) I attended a concert of a group that back then was named Mayday. Since I loved their music I even bought their CD and now I believe I have the one and only copy in the whole Italy! Recently I visited their website and discovered they changed their name in Fifth Lane, apparently because they had a trademark conflict. The problem is, Fifth Lane was taken as well! I sincerely hope they won’t be forced to change name again. Guys good luck! See you in Firenze for your next European tour

In the global village of Internet days choosing a good name for a product, a band name or a blog site is very hard. There is an good chance you hit somebody who chose the same before you. I think in a few years trademarks contextualized in hierarchies (such as internet TLDs) will become commonplace. At that point will be completely normal to call a group mayday.nl and that will not collide with mayday.us. Basically I’m theorizing the merge of trademarks and DNS system, but maybe to get there first we have to make DNS more fair and trustworthy, e.g. by removing any ties to US Administration and to local governments in general.

Last night I’ve been at Supperclub in Rome. It was Marco’s birthday party and there was lots of people from work. The interesting thing about this place is that the dinner party happens in a sort of gigantic bed. Between pillows and bed linen you sit side by side with people, without shoes, drinking and eating, so you’re pretty much forced to meet people and small talk with them. On top of this, you get shiatsu massages provided by a professional. This is about the most relaxing and socializing party experience you can get.