Blues under the tuscan sun

I made the last night

of the Pistoia blues festival yesterday
and i finally got to see Robert Cray live.

A really exelllent show, 5 hours of non-stop

blues. Robert Cray and Jimmy Vauhan both
got a little more than an hour, and

Bob put on a show that demonstrated
why he had top billing.

The Italian blues singers were excellent

too, singing in perfect southern
bluesy english, then speaking in italian

sounded pretty weired. Frencesco
Piu was the best blues singer, just one

man with an acoustic guitar, but he only
had 3 songs.

oh well, back to emilia romagna.

Updated back home, added pictures, links.

The other group that played that has a really big future is Cedric Burnside and

Lightnin' Malcolm from Holly Creek Mississippi. Just a Drummer and lead guitar

and they both sang, but they really tore the heck out of their instruments.

mmmmmm, lunch.

I just had a super good lunch at la tavolaccio, just their ordinary lunch special of
spedinni quatro formaggio for prima piatti and tonnato for secundi, piu patata al forno.

Freaking excellent. Tonnato is veal sliced thin covered in a sauce made from tuna
an mayonaise (i think). spedinni are star shaped tubular pasta that are about the
same size as kraft macaroni and cheese, but just cooked al dente with a white cheese
sauce made from 4 cheeses. Plus a half liter of wine. (doh!)

What I like about italian food is the good food isn't the outliers, I don't think there
are many 4 star italian restaurants serving minute portions of food, but the average
places are so good. Of course, this is where the truckers go too, so there's some universal
law at work of 'eat where the truckers eat'.

Lunch was topped off by a nice coffee. I think the big difference between new arrivals and
people that have lived in italy a while is the way they drink coffee. First of all, there
is a national law that says no cappuccino after lunch (or after any food, depending who you
ask). Second is when I first arrived I saw the tiny espressos and drank them in a gulp.
After a while, the sip of coffee in the espresso cup becomes 4 sips and then the real miracle
is when you realize that there is a fifth sip that include all the sugar that you put in the coffee.
(no sweet and low here).

I don't know how I'll make it back to drinking normal drip coffee. Once we get home I'm
afraid I'll be a tea drinker.

Saints and suitcase bombs

I had an early flight this morning and I meant to wake up in time
to watch some of monday night football before heading out. As normal
I woke up just in time to get in the taxi and dash to the airport. I wanted
to know how the Saints - Falcons game was going and the only way was to
use the Forbidden Phone Internet. Normally touching any advanced feature
on my crappy Palm phone gives a warning in Italian that suggests using a different
connection for half price internet

But I didn't care, I cast Euros to the wind and connected to NFL.com to get
the score...28 - 21 and we're beating the evil Falcons in the 3rd quarter, then
I hit reload 50 times on the way to Bologna as the falcons got a field goal then
the saints got the ball. I reached the Alitalia counter and got in line behind a
heavy-set nervous looking guy. He said something in Italian that I missed because
I was reading the last play ("hey little rabbbit, hold da ballons while I tie da shoe
laces") then he scampered away. I looked up to see his giant bag in front of me
that if it was a bomb would blow me halfway back to ravenna, but I just kept
clicking refresh until the Saints scored!

If it had been a movie the camera would have panned back as I threw my hands
up in victory then blasted me to kingdom come. Instead the nervous guy got back
in line as it just started to move, having had his cappucino and crossaint. Well worth
being blown up as long as the saints make it to the superbowl.

Avanti

The movie "Avanti" with Jack Lemmon was on sky this morning, it's a pretty funny
movie with most of the comedy based on quirks that are seen in italy. The 3 hour lunch
when everything is closed with 16 kinds of pasta available was spot on, but I thought the funniest
was the scene in the morgue at 8:10 in the above clip as the coroner stamps all the forms
in triplicate, then sticks other stamps onto each form. That really captured the individual
style of italians while showing the omnipresent bureaucracy here.

Round and round we go

There's an interesting article over on slate about the adoption of
roundabouts in the USA. Apart from Lee Circle in New Orleans, I can
only think of one other roundabout and it's a new one that was put in
5 years or so ago in Lafayette.

Here in Ravenna they are everywhere, from my house to the office there
are 6 of them in the route, with only 2 traffic lights. For low to medium traffic
intersections they are fantastic. On the way to work in the morning they allow
you to zip through intersections without much fear, while the two traffic lights I have
to cross are still blinking yellow lights when I go through and I must treat them as
possible collision points. If I had to pass thorough 6 normal traffic lights on the way
to work, it would take me twice as long to get there.

For the high traffic intersections they make life interesting, and it took me a while
to learn the pattern, a key thing to watch for being cars exiting onto the same street
you are entering from. When a car exits, he's in the right lane or crossing from the inside
lane to the right lane and he'll block off the traffic entering from the next street. This
is when you can go...and go go go.

Italian drivers are the most aggressive in the world, if you're not going when you should be,
they are on the horn. They zip around roundabouts like F1 drivers whether they are in
a smart car or a 20 ton garbage truck. I don't know if the plethora of roundabouts and small
cars made them aggressive, or if they started out aggressive when they took their first
chariot out of the garage. It will be interesting to find out as more roundabouts appear
in the USA, it's one thing to zip around a roundabout in a Fiat, but when you have to do
it in surburban eating a cheeseburger and talking on the phone it will be even more interesting.

Earthquake in italy

The Milan newspaper Corriere della sera (evening runner?) has an english edition
on the web that has more earthquake details:

RACE AGAINST TIME – Yet again for rescue workers, it is a race against time. As the hours tick by, hopes of finding more survivors under the rubble are fading. So far, more than 100 people have been pulled from the wreckage. Digging continued without interruption through the night at L’Aquila, and in neighbouring municipalities, despite the dozens of tremors that punctuated the darkness. The most violent, which came at 1.15 am, registered 4.8 on the Richter scale. At 2 am, twenty-three hours after the earthquake hit L’Aquila, Marta, a 24-year-old student from the province of Teramo, was rescued from the rubble.

What a terrible way to spend holy week, living in tents or in their cars.
The office is collecting things to send down there but another coworker pointed out
this way to donate:

If you have an Italian mobile phone number, you can send a sms to the following number 48580. You will give one Euro to Protezione Civile. http://www.protezionecivile.it/cms/view.php?cms_pk=15409&dir_pk=52

Earthquake in italy

There was a big earthquake down south in L'aquila just east
of Rome this morning. Yahoo news says more than 100 people
died and I'm afraid it will be more. That city is like Assisi where we
went 2 weeks ago, a medieval city made of large stone bricks. what
a frightening place to be in an earthquake. Since it hit at 3:30 am,
people never had a chance.

Strangely enough there was a tremor here at 10 pm. It was a short and
sharp temblor that started with a vibration that I thought was a truck passing,
then a sharp motion that was unmistakably an earthquake, I started to run
down the hallway but by the time I moved 10 steps it had stopped.
That was less unpleasant than the earthquakes in Bogota where we were
6 stories up, and the earthquake steadily built, but luckily stopped before it was
bad.

I wonder where we can live where there are no earthquakes, floods, hurricanes,
tsunamis or meteor strikes.

Gas crises

ROMA - "E' una crisi difficile ma garantiremo gas e energia alle imprese e alle famiglie". Il ministro per lo sviluppo economico, Claudio Scajola, intervistato a Panorama del giorno su Canale 5, parla della guerra del gas e assicura che - anche nell'ipotesi peggiore di blocco delle forniture dalla Russia - "abbiamo riserve per 2 mesi". Intanto, la via diplomatica incentivata dalla Ue va avanti: a Bruxelles sono in corso i colloqui tra l'Autorità Ue, la Commissione e i massimi responsabili di Gazprom e Naftogaz, le società energetiche russa e ucraina. "Abbiamo una ragionevole speranza di un ritorno alla normalità nelle forniture dalla russia via ucraina", ha dichiarato il ministro degli esteri e vicepremier ceco Alexandr Vondra.

the key statment in there is "abbiamo riserve per 2 mesi". we have reserves for 2 months.
If this thing isn't settled by february 1st I'll buy some tickets out of here to beat the rush.
It's one thing to have no heat in houston, but no heat here we'd freeze.

In fashion in Italy

We're in Italy now, we've been here a week and I still feel jet-lagged.
I have to say that was one of the worst airplane trips ever, only beaten out
by the 10 hour diarrhea flight from hell way back in 2000, when I flew
from bogota to germany and spent 9 out of 10 hours on the plane in the
bathroom. I've never had so many germans angry at me, I felt like the
Jewish guy at a nazi rally. [der fatten guy es en der batroom again]

This trip was crappy purely due to poor service from continental. We were
the only suckers with y class tickets on the plane not in first class, and we still got
wrong information from everyone we spoke with. I called their international line
and confirmed seat assignments and tickets on both legs of the trip, when we
arrived in Paris we didn't have a confirmed seat on the air france flight and we
were on standby. Air France did give great service and get us on the flight, so in
the end things worked out, it was just exhausting.

Ravenna is super crowded now. It is now the high season for tourists visiting the
churches here and the beach at Rimini. The quiet little town I first came to 2 months
ago is now packed with beautiful people and buses of icon gawking american tourists.



[here's the plaza de popalo looking
away from the stage]














We even had a fashion show last night. The plaza de populo was filled with a runway
and lots of chairs, while beautifully dressed people circled anxiously waiting to see if their
designs would be accepted by the masses of walmart shoppers. Or maybe they didn't care
if anyone bought anything, who knows. We got to watch them do a sound check then
later on at night we watched the show. I videotaped most of it, even when the male models
came out, I just shot them as part of a wide shot. Yes, it was just a coincidence that all
the male models were panned back while the lingerie models were shot zoomed until the
sony camera was making a clicking noise that said "I can't zoom any more, perv".










[a picture of the mic check with
the models practicing walking down
the runway.]

In Italy only the pizza can hear you scream

I'm in Italy, and if everything goes ok we'll move over here
in a month or so. If everything doesn't go ok I'll finally get a chance
to demonstrate my entrepreneurial skills cleaning windshields on highway
59 in sugarland. My previous assignment is ending, and I don't think I'll get
any tropies for the job I did, not even a participation trophy. Oh well.

It's always funny how the jobs that you really work at aren't the ones
where you're recognized as doing a lot of work. It's possible to skate
through a whole year, but really nail one presentation where a boss that
matters is there and suddenly you're a genius, or you work dog hard traveling
all over the world doing shit that's not part of your job, and suddenly you're
happy to stay on doing the job of dishwasher.

The sadness of having to kill my dog, and being away from my family and
the last job ending on such a low note has built up all week. Now I'm holed
up in my hotel room drinking kieffer brau, which was the cheapest beer that
the grocery store sold and faced with the realization that I bought a six pack
of beer when a suitcase was called for.

Oh woe betide the country that doesn't sell oversized easy to carry boxes with 18, 24 or 36 beers! They shalt not dwell in drunkland nor pass out with the tv at full volume,
sleeping until the cleaning lady knocks to see if the crazy gringo croaked.
(and that's just after 3 beers, just think what crap I'll write when I'm wound up.
my mouse needs a breathalyser for later)

The food here in Ravenna seems to alternate between fantastic and pizza.
Since I keep screwing up and not arriving from work before everything closes,
pizza seems to be the only option every night. It's good pizza, it's just I seem
to be eating an awful lot of it. I did have some super fantastic gnoche and
insalata de pollo in the plaza di popolo earlier in the week, but I tried to repeat
that today and they had already closed at 2:30 pm. doh!

It is nice to be someplace that is extremely secure and I can just wander around
half lost. If you wander around half lost in bogota you are asking to be taken
for a paseo millionario. Here everyone is so old, I'm pretty confident I could take
them using breadsticks as weapons.


Here is a typical Ravenna street
scene, where I am one of the few
pedestrians and everyone else
has a bike. Apparently there are
free bikes for use here, but I don't
know if those are just random bikes
in racks or specific racks, and I don't
know enough italian to ask.

I don't want some old guy with a
breadstick chasing after me as
I ride off on his bike, so I'm sticking
with walking so far.