Eat, eat, eat

I came back from Italy to Holland with a suitcase full of food. Specialties, liquours, cakes... everything lekker that Italy has to offer. I didn't think I was this nationalist before coming here.

So, what does one do with food? You've guessed it!

On the first day at work, panettone and pandoro day again, just like last year.

Then, I invited my Italian colleagues at home, to eat zampone (pig's leg, typical for New Year's Day) and lentils. Only, Elisa told me that she needed all the zamponi, because she invited seventeen people for dinner. The situation was solved by having a zampone sent by mail in a parcel. So I, my colleagues and some friends of friends gathered at my house and enjoyed. Despite being the first time with a lot of messy organization, the zampone turned out to be good.

Last Monday, it was the turn of Elisa's 17 friends, and the neighbour downstairs, who also lent many chairs which made the thing possible. Incredible but true, it worked! Two friends of Elisa's, both Italian, helped a lot (I didn't), and all the Dutch and not Dutch people who were present appreciated. Some even said it was the best dinner of their lives. The menu was staggering: crostini (small pieces of roasted bread) with tomato and garlic, with liver paté, with olives paté; raw ham, mortadella, finocchiona (a special salami aromatized with fennel seeds); bucatini all'amatriciana; linguine al pesto; zampone (again) with lentils; panettone, panforte, mascarpone cream, brutti ma buoni (a meringue candy); Lavazza coffee; liquour as "coffee killer"; lots and lots of wine. It's amazing we survived. I ate left-overs of that dinner for all the following lunches and dinners until today (except yesterday's dinner). And there's still something left.

And yesterday, there was a dinner with a selected group of colleagues, all working on the same product, but on different sides: development, testing, product management. And it was great fun. At work, people often talk about work, because it's the only common ground. During lunch breaks, in front of the coffee machine, on the Fridays at De Heeren Van Aemstel or Coco's, at the company-organized parties, you really make friends, and contact with people is always an enriching experience. And, often, you get to discover hidden sides of people, which is always a surprise. Shy, silent people, who do not look interested to anything else but work, open up and show others their world, their experiences, their life. As they say, If I give you an idea and you give me an idea, we'll both have two ideas. Among the discoveries, the most amazing was that one of the product managers, born in India, lived most of his life in England, was part of the RAF, was in the Falklands during the war, and he lived 2 years at just 10 kilometers from where I was born! The world is really small.