Joe's Blög

it’s not 12°…baby it’s cold outside…

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As a pre dinner project I decided to take some pics from my balcony. The sunset was lovely.
The mountains get higher behind the flat. I gotta get an x-ray camera soon…

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Frankfurt hi 7, lo 0
Pisa hi 18, lo 1

hahahahahah…..wait….why am I laughing? I have to ride to work in the morning with a half flat tire, and a half broken pedal….ugh….I hope nothing breaks before I get to work….

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someone needs to change that pesky US law about natural born citizens being president…The first 7 US presidents were not natural born citizens.
Here’s the rundown (with an excerpt from each article) on “far and away” the best leader Italy has ever had. I’ll be writing him in on my next U.S. presidential ballot…

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The prime minister’s demeaning attitude toward women, for example, is for him as much a political device as a personal vice. “I think Italians recognize themselves in me,” he recently told a youth rally. “I am one of them. I was poor. I am interested in the things that interest them. I love football. I smile. I love others and, above all else, beautiful women.”
(and the title of this page is from this article)

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Besides, with Berlusconi as your prime minister, you don’t have to take yourself too seriously. You don’t have to trouble yourself with geopolitics, or the state of the planet, or poverty and failed states. You can stay at home, remain unserious, and argue about the latest legal scandal. And maybe that, too, is part of the Italian prime minister’s appeal.

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The truth is that Berlusconi is not only Italy’s head of government, but the nation’s autobiography. He combines generosity, inconsistency, acting talent, stamina, tactical lapses of memory and loyalty. He promises things he doesn’t do, and does things he’s never mentioned. His Italian opponents — even the best, the most honest and lucid — are right to worry. Not about Berlusconi himself. But about the Berlusconi inside them.

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“Never in my life, not even once, have I had to pay for a sexual encounter,” Berlusconi said. “And I’ll tell you why: for someone who loves to conquer, the greatest joy is the conquest, so I ask, ‘if you pay, what joy can there be?’”

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I guess this is a lot of the german women I’ve known are not too fond of italian men.

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Some genius from the centeour of the civilized world came to my page by searching on “how many octagon shapes are there”….

really….”how many octagon shapes are there”

there are 23…or maybe there are 42…
well…if it’s not 23 or 42 then it’s definitely a prime number…or something to do with pi…

Let’s ask Berlusconi…he must know.

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I’m not sure which to write about first…

So the other day I’m walking the neighborhood and I note that there is a sort of convenience store/meat and cheese shop in around the corner. It was the weekend so it was closed, but I looked in the windows like a stalker and saw that they have some necessities like laundry detergent (which I need soon), wine, crackers, milk etc. They also had some things I don’t need such as…large chunks of dried ham, cheese, fresh fruit and vegetables…This seems the oddest combination of items found in a small store that I’ve ever seen. It’s a butcher shop that sells wine and laundry detergent. So the coffee shops sell cigarettes and lotto tickets, and the butcher shops sell laundry detergent…got it! Welcome to Italy. Where you have to go to 5 stores per day just to get by
Anyway since I’m now carless (and bike-ful) I can’t really be bothered going to Carrefour (the gigantic wal mart equivalent) because Carrefour is too far away from home to carry a bunch of crap via cycle. So now I’m shopping and eating locally.
I picked up a bottle of wine and some cookies (with smiley faces on them) at the semi-butcher shop on the way home (mmmm. Why hello healthy lifestyle)…and it turns out the wine I bought is some sort of sparkling red wine that cost 2.30€. It’s not very good, but I’ll probably drink it anyways…

Which reminds me that the Carrefour does have TWO bottles of wine available for 0.99€ each, and another choice for a mere 1.09€. I guess they have no taxes on the alcohol or something. I’ve not tried the cheap wine, but that combined with the free appetizers when you buy a drink might just make this a homeless persons paradise. Think about it…if you were homeless you could roll out from under your tree sometimes around 10am. Take your dog to the city center. beg for a bit…cash your homeless citizen check. buy a bottle of 0.99€ wine for the afternoon. Take a nap about 2 and get up again at 6pm. Take 4€ and go find a place that has free appetizers (when you buy a drink) pick up another 0.99€ bottle of wine for the evening and just pet your homeless dog for 6 hours until you fall asleep again…In the summer you could hit a free beach and nap there for a few hours…ahhh paradise.

I’ve not seen any homeless people in this town so I guess Italy is doing a fine job with generating jobs or something.

…Today I roll out of bed early (guess who woke me up? – clomp clomp CLOMP) and I look out the window to note very dark skies out over the sea….It’s not raining yet, but obviously will soon. I did my most amazing superhero quick change and roll out to work immediately in hope of beating the rain…I did by about 2 minutes…and it rained HARD for a few hours, but by the time I got off work the sun was completely out. The only clouds I saw were up on the mountains (someday I’ll take a video so everyone can understand microclimate) and it’s beautiful again except for a bit of wind.
I mentioned before the weather similiarites to Oregon and this was another one. A complete change from one type of weather day to a completely different type of day (and it took less than a day). Amazing.
In Frankfurt this didn’t really happen. It would sometimes go from bad to worse, but you could basically tell from the time you got up what the day was going to be like. I am quite liking it here…not just the weather is great, but the Italians are being super nice to me and making me feel welcome etc.
I think it’s going well and I’m getting settled (just in time to have to move).

I guess on the proverbial to-do list for the week is make contact with the housing agency to see if I can find a rental in the next week weeks. Hopefully can start looking this week or next. Also am going to sign up for a doctor tomorrow (I guess the equivalent of a primary care physician as we’d say in the states)…

I’ve also read that Italy recently passed a law that allows them to censor blogs and anything else they want to….ummmm…..while that might be an exaggeration I would just like to state for the record….I love Italy!!!! I also sincerely believe that Berluscony is the greatest leader Italy has ever seen (but then I’m a yank and the only other leader of Italy that I could name would be ummmm….. Mussoliny)…damn! I just mentioned Berluscony and Mussoliny in the same sentence…I’m not comparing them, just pointing out my ignorance about former italian leaders…and how I’m hoping to grow in my knowledge of this culture and learn stuff…and stuff…
For the record I intentionally mispelled their names so this doesn’t show up in search engines… paranoid yanks!!!!
…and I really do like it here

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Managed to find some more wintery type clothes. Got a hoody, long sleeve t shirt, socks and a pair of pants. Riding my bike home was a struggle as I had planned to buy a backpack at the store, but the backpacks they had were either hot pink or too small, so I bought a shoulder bag and put as much in it as I could and carried the rest in the plastic bag. Not so easy to ride a bike with a bag in your hand. I think last time I did that was when I broke Shauns bike because the picture frames got caught in the wheel
This entry just isn’t mundane enough. My weekends are obviously not exciting. Someone come entertain me.

…and this site is pretty good I think. At least for those of us working for learn italian: http://becomingitalianwordbyword.typepad.com/becomingitalian/

Today was a gorgeous day. I’m going to love the winters here. I was talking with my boss (I have two people that I refer to as my boss – I’ll differentiate by referring to them  by their nationalities)…my german boss about the weather the other day and the weather here of late reminds me a bit of living in Coquille (near the coast on Southern Oregon). The best weather was always in the winter between storms. A winter storm would come through and for a couple days it would be clear and sometimes quite warm. I think it will be the same here, but the storms will not last as long (one day instead of 3), and the time between storms will hopefully be long. However it’s only October so I’m probably not qualified to make predictions like that (I’m the weatherman).

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I got up fairly early with the plan to go to La Spezia and do a bit of clothes shopping. I got to the train station about 10 am with no idea when the train comes. I figure at worst it’s once every hour…It is once every hour. Every hour EXCEPT the 10 o clock hour. So I have time to kill until 11:44. So I spent an hour and a half walking around the Massa train station. I did find a movie theatre in town. They seem to have 2 screens. So if I get desperate for a movie, any movie I know where to go. It will be in Italian…

I wandered past a movie rental store and went in. They also sell some videos and I found some documentary titled “I Sudditi del signore degli Anelli – Tutto Quello che Ancora non Sapete Sull Saga di Tokien e i Suolfan” or “The subjects of the Lord of the Rings – all those who do not know about Saga Tokien and Suolfan” (I have no idea what Suolfan is supposed to translate to – super fan or something).
A docu about the Lord of the Ring geeks. It got several film festival nominations…including the South Pole International Film Festival…what?!?…(my speculation – Previous winner “March of the Penguins”?)
My favorite part is that it has audio in Inglese, Francese, or Spagnolo (with subtitles in about 2o languages). So how does Italy rate? They were big enough to get their own packaging on this DVD, but not big enough to hire 12 people to do voiceover work…They could have gotten college interns or something to do it for free…
Haven’t watched it yet…
I did make it to La Spezia.
Here’s my free tip for americans travelling in Europe. Sometimes a city will have 2 or more train stops in a single city…This means if you need to get off at La Spezia CENTRALE don’t get off at La Spezia non-Centrale (whatever it was called).
Trains are cool. I went from Salem to Seattle several times when I was still in the States. It is a great trip. I recommend train travel to america…

Apparently I’m going to have to make a ramblings category as well as that seems to be what I’m doing now.

OK made it to La Spezia Centrale (it wasn’t me that got off at the wrong station, but two other americans on the train – I know the game). I wasn’t expecting for the stores to close for siesta. I think when I was in La Spezia in May they didn’t do that, but I could be wrong. The restaurants did, but that’s to be expected.
Anyway I mainly went to La Spezia to shop a bit as most of my clothes are still in ffm. I didn’t feel like hanging out for siesta so I came back and hung out here instead.

This seems like a really long entry to basically say I rode a train and walked around a bit…

	“The subjects of the Lord of the Rings – all those who do not know about Saga Tokien and Suolfan”
Italian — Detect language — Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Belarusian Bulgarian Catalan Chinese Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish > English — Afrikaans Albanian Arabic Belarusian Bulgarian Catalan Chinese (Simplified) Chinese (Traditional) Croatian Czech Danish Dutch English Estonian Filipino Finnish French Galician German Greek Hebrew Hindi Hungarian Icelandic Indonesian Irish Italian Japanese Korean Latvian Lithuanian Macedonian Malay Maltese Norwegian Persian Polish Portuguese Romanian Russian Serbian Slovak Slovenian Spanish Swahili Swedish Thai Turkish Ukrainian Vietnamese Welsh Yiddish swap

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Those of you who live in a country where you don’t speak the language know what I’m talking about.
I’ve been going to this trinkhalle/convenience store/italian coffee shop for weeks now (before I even moved here – it’s the closest one to the flat where I’m staying)…anyway she knows I don’t speak Italian and I could never quite figure out if she liked me or hated me (or was drunk), as we’ve had a few small interchanges in the past…she’s the one who taught me “tiepido” (not on purpose- it just kind of happened when I tried to order a latte macchiato).
So tonight I stop in on my way to dinner and she decides to have a conversation with me…she knows I don’t speak Italian so my contribution was basically “io non capisco” (I don’t understand). Yet she kept talking. So I got to really practice my italian by saying “io non capisco” 3 times or so…I have no idea if she was insulting my mother or just being nice to me. I’m not sure if I should go back or not…she intimidates me even though she’s about 1 meter tall and weighs 30 kilos…

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Every night and every morn
Some to misery are born,
Every morn and every night
Some are born to sweet delight.

Some are born to sweet delight,
Some are born to endless night.

Watching “Dead Man” again…

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