Italy, week TRE

This will be a rather short post. Just arrived home from Bologna. Rented a car for the weekend. Just before that I made fun of the Italian police cars, very often tiny little Fiat Puntos (to be fair, they also have Ferraris as police cars). And then I got a Punto myself and the Italian colleague said: “See, God exists!” Anyway its cheap and has AC, and I never was able to cross the limit of 120 km/h due to traffic jam. After 3 hours we arrived in Bologna (40 minutes on the way back). This time without nitric acid and hence much more time and freedom (I promised a story in the previous post, but there is none, it was just the idea that it could be thrilling, however it was really a very boring trip straight to the university and back with both hands and eyes on my back so that no one accidently shakes the nitric acid containing box. It was needed to etch some stainless steel to get a needle shaped wire, which will hopefully serve as a hot-wire prongs, but enough about that; back to Italy). We went to Nutelleria, a restautant serving only stuff with Nutella, even Pizza (It is amazing what kind of Nutella and KinderSchokolade stuff they have in Italy compared to Germay or Sweden!) Unfortunately it wasn’t as good as expected. I guess there is a limit with things you can do with sweets, at some point it doesn’t make sense anymore, like my experience with sweets and bred.

Although I thought there was only one leaning tower (of Pisa) in Italy, I was happy to see another in Bologna. I am not sure, but the closer you come the more leaned it looks. On the other hand if you apply that measure on other buildings in Bologna they all look like tilted.

There is more to come for week three, but this is enough for today. 12 hours out with our son on the highways and Bologna and many rest stops where we changed diapers in front of the cars and old ladies came to speak to him are enough. You can’t just go away, you have to wait until every lady had spoken to him.

Italy, week DUE

Unfortunately we didn’t manage to find any Italian language courses in Forli for the summer. I am not so much concerned about that. I know how to get icecream and at the university my English is sufficient. We are still unsure what we are going to do over the weekend, but we are not renting a car this weekend, thats for sure. So it will be one of the following activities: Bologna with train, Predappio (where Mussolini is buried; I even didn’t know they had a mausoleum for him; recently also known among Turbulence researcher – at least those who are involved – for the new long pipe experiment) by bus, and Cesena by bus as well. We are not sure how much we can accomplish, it all depends on our son, who has a new hobby: screaming and carping (nörgeln?) like hell, not crying. Anyway, to make live more livable I bought a ventilator, a USB TV card for my laptop and a all-you-can-eat -icecream-card. The latter is of course only true in my dreams, so I still try to restrict my icecream consume. But I have to say it is really not easy to eat lots of icecream, because it is soo hot, that a not negligible amount of it will always land on your clothes. And for those who are planing to visit Italy. If you don’t have a baby, make or borrow one. It will help you a lot here if you don’t speak Italian . It would be even better if you bring your mother with you, so that you can let her do the dirty work, like looking after the baby when not needed for your own advantages. Beeing in Italy has one disadvantage, we have no holiday today, whereas Sweden celebrates its Midsummar (we all know how that is going NOT to be celebrated).

Mon amour mon ami

It was sometime around last summer. I – as usual – in front of my Computer and my wife in front of the TV. It was a normal weekend, so we deserved to relax. Then suddenly she jumped up and called me, because while watching 8 Women on TV she wanted to show me the following scene:

or in its original version:

That night we searched for the song, listened to it the whole night while searching for cheap flights to Paris. That’s how things are in our live, very spontaneous. I never really wanted to go to France. My wife studied 2 years in Karlsruhe, close to the French border and every time I visited her we could have crossed the border within few minutes, but we didn’t. Two or three times we started in the morning and than somewhere around Strasbourg we stopped visited the town and decided to drive back; so we never made it to Paris Both of us do not speak any French, she had Russian and I Latin as my second foreign language, hence we would have been lost (that is what we thought, but since my Japan visit I know better, one doesn’t need to know anything just to visit a country; it is even more fun without ). But that night, while listening to mon amour mon ami we just wanted soo deeply to go there, but somehow didn’t manage.

But since then that particular night that song is in my iTunes and I checked it this morning, I have listened to it knowingly or unknowingly for almost 3000 times! Evidence is here: