Queen's Day

Yesterday was Queen's Day. It's 30th April every year. What do you say, yesterday was 29th? Well, apparently there's a rule for which, if 30th April is Sunday, Queen's Day is on 29th that year.

Dutch people go mad on that day. People on streets, live music in stages all over the city, orange clothes (Oranje is the royal family. And also the colour of the football's national team).

In many places, including around where I live, there was the free market: everyone could sell thier used objects. It was more of a dump than a market, with old and useless stuff for sale, but it was fun. Also, stands with food, books, children plays...

Then I and Elisa met in Leidseplein with some of her colleagues, nice people. We strolled around the crowded streets, until finally we got to the Jordaan district and stopped in a pub.

People in boats in the canals

The wise man does not piss in the wind (a Latin inscription near Leidseplein)

A guy who charged 1 Euro to have eggs thrown on him. But very few could hit him

It was very hard to find a place to eat, but, after a long wait, we did. And, after that, we went home with the metro (as there were no trams and buses in the centre). A very fun day.

Maybe I will learn this bloody language (eventually) (in 10 years, or more)

I found an ad from a man wanting to exchange Dutch lessons with Italian lessons. So I answered. We exchanged some e-mails: mine were written in Dutch, and his in Italian, and we corrected each other's mistakes.

On Thursday we met. His name is Gert and he is very keen to learn Italian. He already writes very well, and speaks it slowly but correctly. I also tried to speak, and discovered (as if I didn't know before) that I still speak in a terrible way. Slowly, without knowing the indispensable words, and with completely wrong word order. .

But I found the evening very useful. Practice is definitely what's needed. If he is patient enough to bear with me and my horrible Dutch, we both will benefit.

Five

Another hole in my bike's rear tyre. The fifth one. My neighbours tell me I should throw away the bike. Maybe they're right. Surely, a visit to a (trustworthy) bike repairer is necessary

Leaks

Last Thursday I fixed a leak in the rear tyre of my bycicle. It's the fourth time since I'm here. Maybe this blog should be renamed to The eternal struggle of one man against one bike and only report about leaky tyres. There would be enough material to fill a blog, although it would get a little repetitive.

Visits

After being in Italy for the elections, I'm back to Amsterdam. So I spent Easter in the Netherlands. Many tourists came here for the holidays, so the city is much more crowded than usual.

Among those tourists, two former colleagues of mine, of the time I worked in Turin, with their respective girlfriends (one of which works in the same place). It was a pleasant experience. We first met on Friday evening, they let me and Elisa (who didn't know them) in their hotel room (note: they were not use to Amsterdam's steep stairs), then we had pizza together (real Italians! We dared eat one of those touristy, un-authentic, mozzarella-less pizzas! Not so bad though) and had a little walk. On Saturday we did probably the most touristy thing we could: a boat ride through the canals. It was the first time for them, and for us too.

The six bridges over the Reguliersgracht

A house-boat for sale. Anyone wanna buy?

Then everybody came to my house, including a Dutch friend who studied in Turin for his Erasmus, and now studies in Delft. Italian food galore. Actually, not so much, it was the first time a dinner was prepared for so many people. But everybody seemed satisfied. Overall, they've been two great days. Let's hope my friends could visit the Anne Frank museum (when they tried, the queue for the tickets was just too long) before coming home.

Forza Italia!

Now I'm proud to be an Italian. Again.

Funny signs

No alcohol (in the Oosterpark)

No noisy thingies. Also no grilled meat (or whatever is that in the bottom right) (in the Vondelpark)

Danger, birds! (on the road to Marken)

Some years ago, in Eindhoven, I saw a "No pissing" sign, which is even weirder than those.

Het is lente

It's spring! The weather has suddenly changed (all weather changes are sudden here) for the better, and it's more sunny. But, most important of all, there are more daylight hours. Also, the daylight saving time, although it forces to wake up earlier, means that the sun goes down one hour later, and that's such a pleasure.

I'm getting ready for my return to Italy. On the 9th, there are general elections. And they are very important, because they are a unique chance to pose an end to the Berlusconi premiership. Berlusconi is a great liar: he lies, but in a very convinving way. He points out all the opposition's misdeeds, and he never cares about his, which are exactly the same, only 10 times greater. His government is very much committed in laws that influence him directly, yet he is very good at shifting the focus away from that fact. He loves to choose as government partners some very conservative, when not outright racist, people, which have a great deal of influence in government policy, yet he is the frontman, so those people can act unseen and undisturbed, while he gets all the attention himself. And he simply does not care about the reputation of clown he earned abroad, because those people do not have right to vote in Italy.
I don't think his opposition is the best possible opposition, but i do think that things would improve tenfold if he stops being the prime minister.

Back from CeBIT

CeBIT was great fun. Lots to see, colourful, huge, yet not too messy.

On Friday, I and my colleagues arrived in Hannover, and most of us went to the hotel, very far away from the fair (about 10 km) and even farther from the central station. Then we went to the fair. Since there was no room at the company's booth for our luggage, we went to the garderobe, which was just outside the fair's turnstiles. After that, the turnstiles simply refused to let us in again. It was a mistake from us: we should have told the security personnel we were temporarily leaving, so the intelligent turnstiles would have let us in. But we didn't know. And the turnstiles were not intelligent enough to figure that. And the security woman was really, really German, and just told us "You used your ticket, so you can't get in again. Stop". Luckily, with some phone calls and help from another security woman, we could get in.

When inside, we just forgot to have lunch. There was so much to see. And I got my indispensable calories from candies many booths were giving away. Strangely enough, many big names were not present or not so visible (Sony, Motorola, Philips). But there was IBM, Siemens (playing home), Microsoft. Not many Linux companies, what a pity. Novell dedicated a very small area of its booth to Linux. And there was even Commodore, which was so important in my teenage, when I used to spend all my free time in front of a C64.
For dinner, we went to a carefully chosen restaurant: it was the first Greek restaurant we saw just before the tram stopped by it. It turned out to be very good, a lot of meat, tasty. And the atmosphere among colleagues was so nice. It is good to have these moments, otherwise the only relationships among us would be work.

The day after, it was a little colder.

My colleagues waiting for the tram at the tram stop (reached through a shortcut) on Saturday morning

I remembered I am a Telecommunciations' engineer, and I stayed pretty long in the telecoms area. It is nice to see all the acronyms studied at school have some practical significance (almost all of them, some are long-forgotten). Since I don't work exactly in the telecoms field, I am behind the latest technology achievements. But it was fun.

The return journey was more exhausting than expected. We knew the train from Hannover would not have reached Holland, and we would have to take a bus from the border to the intermediate station of Almelo. What we didn't know was that that train would have left Hannover with 1h15 delay. I am reconsidering my bad opinion on Trenitalia... Luckily we caught the last train from Almelo. Living in Amsterdam has some advantages, as people living farther away would have to make complicated train changes, and one missed connection would have meant sleeping in a station. But I hope everybody went home safe. Tomorrow we'll discover.

Get lost!

Last Saturday it was nice weather, so I and Elisa decided to go to Muiden by bicycle. I brought my TomTom One to find the way.

So, a bike route sign told us to turn right. The TomTom told us to go straight, so we went straight. Suddenly we met a road with no bicycle lane, and the TomTom told us that it was the right way. What should we do? Elisa thinks that, this time, we should not follow the TomTom, so we turn right. Guess what? We get lost in a plain with little human presence, and still covered by snow from the previous days.
The plain, fortunately, had lots of signposts, so we eventually found our way. And, when in Muiden, we found that the castle was closed.
We had lunch in a typical Dutch bar, furnished with a lot of wood, and with a rug as tablecloth (yes, a rug! I wonder how hygienic it is...). The lunch was not bad, Dutch cheese and worst (sausage).
On the way back home, it started raining. Clouds must have realised we were by bike.
And on Monday I discovered the rear tube had a hole. Again! This time, remembering the past experience, I didn't take off the wheel, I managed to repair it by just removing the external tyre. No more rip-offs from bike repairers!
On Tuesday I voted for the municipality and district elections. As an EU citizen registered as living in the Netherlands, I have right to vote for local elections (not for national ones) automatically. It was fun. The voting offices are much more relaxed than in Italy, no police outside, and they didn't even ask me for a document!

And tomorrow is CeBIT day! Yippie!

And you thought spring was near

Yesterday night snow fell on Amsterdam. This morning the city was covered by white. And it was a sunny day, so the sights were so pretty.

My bike is the third from the left. No wonder today I went to work by tram

Will I ever learn this bloody language?

I am a little behind in posting, so today I am posting about what happened on Wednesday.

The company Dutch lessons have eventually begun. Once a week, every Wednesday after work. The first lesson was fun. We were two classes (beginners 1 and beginners 2) merged together, since one of the teachers couldn't come. Unfortunately this reflected in the fact that some were starting absolutely from scratch, while some others could put some words together. We presented ourselves and interviewed each other. The funniest moment was when one (an English guy) revealed that his Dutch girlfriend is not so happy he cannot speak Dutch after living there for some years (6, I think). He was among the best, however.

They say practice makes perfect. I hope these lessons help do some practice. But 1.5 hours a week are not enough in my opinion. A week earlier, Kees, a colleague of mine who is very fond of Italy and often goes on holiday there, accepted giving me a private lesson of Dutch in exchange for a lesson of Italian. Unfortunately he is leaving for a long holiday. Pity. I need to find some other Dutch willing to learn Italian.

Ajacied

Last Sunday, my neighbour invited me to the Ajax match. It was a lot of fun.

Despite it was not a particularly important match (the opponent, RBC Roosendaal, is the last one in the standings), the stadium was almost completely full. It is good that many people go there. In Italy the stadiums are almost always half-empty, and in general they are a dangerous place, because of the violent supporters (not enough is done to contrast them. Rumours even say that in some cases they are encouraged by the teams' administrations). Here it is nothing like that. Supporters are noisy, colourful, but not dangerous. Also when I and other Italians went to watch Netherlands-Italy last November, the Netherlands supporters screamed "Pizza" at us, hugged us, let us take photo of them and us together, and never did anything that could hurt us.

And Marco, my neighbour, really becomes someone else during a match. He a wife and two children, yet he screamed and yelled every time Ajax scored. And he kept complaining all the time Ajax was not doing as good as it should. After 70' it was ahead 2-0, but that was not enough. Only in the last 20 minutes, according to Marco, did Ajax played as it should have done for all the match. It must have been so: Ajax won 6-0.


Yesterday, Ajax did not so well against Inter (2-2 home, it is almost like losing).

Maybe I should resign from being a Cagliari supporter. If my favourite team were Ajax, at leasy my team would win some matches.

The two of us

A few days ago, Elisa joined me in the Dutch adventure. It's the first time we live together: ironic, we had to move so far away from home...

There are many reasons to like her: she knows everything so there's always something to talk about, I like the fact that she, despite being Catholic, can be critical towards the Pope and Church's excessively old ideas about ethics...

We are very similar. That's the main reason why we are together. Sometimes I think that maybe we are too similar, we do not complement each other. And she already plans to come back to her home town (actually, she plans everything about her future), while I do not like to plan forward and tend to take things as they happen. So, if I don't get fed up about Amsterdam (and Amsterdam does not get fed up about me, which is more likely), why come back?

But the thing I am most afraid is myself. Living together can give infinite satisfaction, but it also requires some sacrifices: keeping the house tidier, giving half of the bed space to someone else (three quarters, actually, judging from the first days)... Will I be able to overcome my selfishness and put up with those, and get the rewards?

This is Amsterdam

Do you know, when you park your car in a busy place, and, when you pick it up, find an ad leaflet under the windscreen wiper? Yesterday, when I came out from work, I found an ad leaflet hung to my bicycle's handle.

Spa baths: they should be required by law

Belated post about weekend. Last Saturday I went to Aachen, in Germany but just 5 km from the border with the Netherlands, to visit Francesco, a former colleague of mine.

Some background info: I joined Philips Italy, as a "research scientist" (this title really sounds good! My current title is not even close to that), in 2000. Francesco had started doing his internship as a graduate student one week before. Our research group turned out to be very good. We were using Bluetooth about three years before it became a trendy gadget present in all high-range mobile phone. And, most important of all, we were having fun doing what we were doing, with slack deadlines and quite a lot of freedom in choosing what to do. Francesco (who later on graduated and became a full-time employee) was a volcano of ideas, while I was more of a geek, focused on Linux and C programming (I still am, although no more so Linux-oriented. What a pity).
In 2002, Philips Research went under a restructuring, which involved closure of the Italian lab. So we were kindly "invited" to find another job. Motivation in all the lab employees plummeted. Our job became sending CVs, downloading songs from the Internet, watching movies during work hours... And we were paid for that! Not forever :( About one third of the people were moved in the lab next door (which, about two years later, underwent the same fate...). The others found jobs elsewhere, inside or outside Philips. My job was outside Philips, while Francesco joined Aachen's Philips research lab.

The weekend was a lot of fun. In Saturday Francesco introduced me to the Carolus Thermen, which are simply marvellous: hot water, cold water (much better than I expected), open-air pools with spinning water, sauna... Then we went to a pizzeria with some colleagues of him, mostly non-German. Then, one of them was having a party at his home, so we went there, had fun and drank quite a lot. Then, Francesco insisted we go to a bar, but I reached my limit, so I sat on a sofa and fell asleep...

On Sunday, we went to "les Trois Bornes", the point where Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands border. 5 meters from that point, there is the tallest point in the Netherlands (327 metres above sea. Yes, they are flat). A pretty nice spot, woody hills, perfect for a weekend trip. Then we spent the rest of the day around Aachen, jumping from a tourist spot to a bar and back, and drinking spa water (bleuch...let's hope at least it's healthy). Then, back to Heerlen, in the Netherlands, where I caught my train. Actually, I missed my train, so I waited for one hour until the next one.

And no, no photos. I forgot my camera at home

Sense of humour

Dutch can have a very sharp sense of humour, very different from Italians. An example is this note posted to the window of a ground-floor flat close to my house.

People who do not Dutch need a translation. But I don't know Dutch either... Here is the best I can do (look Mom, no Babelfish!)

Dear burglar,
After 3 burglaries in 18 months
There is really nothing more to be taken.
Otherwise make an appointment in order to come and look
[a mobile phone number follows]

Sad news today

The father of two of my dearest friends, Chiara and Claudia, has died this morning. Chiara is a friend since the beginning of my university years, and she is also the mother of Tito. Claudia is the one I have to thank for the beautiful house I'm living at this time, she is a world traveller, and she introduced me to people of any race, colour and creed.

I wish I could have spoken to either of them, in order to express them my condolences. In times like this, all the people who are suffering for the loss of a person cannot but stay closer together, in order to support each other and help each other bear the pain. And, ironically, in moments like this, one really sees how beautiful life is.

I'll never learn this bloody language

I've living in Amsterdam for two and half months now, and still I'm very far behind in knowledge of the language.

At first, I thought "Easy, as I already know a foreign language, just learn a few words and the basics are there". WRONG. Building a large vocabulary is indispensable, and it takes time and patience.

What I am doing is try to read a lot, with a dictionary on one side, in order to build a large vocabulary. This worked for English, so it should work now. Yet, getting to the point when the general sense of one sentence is clear even when some (many) words are unknown took a long time. And, still, my gaps in vocabulary are abysmal.

Reading and writing...well, I never practise these. Theoretically, I have a lesson book for that. Practically, I dedicate too ittle ltime to it. And I never speak Dutch, because most of my colleagues are not Dutch, and the ones who are know English very well. But, most important of all, sometimes I did try to speak Dutch. The problem was, they understood me, so they replied in Dutch. And I couldn't understand one word.

This leads to the lowest point: understanding spoken language. Every morning, Radio 1 wakes me up. The speakers are very good, they have a clear pronumnciation. So, I understand some words and, at times, even what some sentences mean. But not being able to understand most of it is frustrating.
Listening to the radio makes me believe "Hey, now I really understand!". Then, frustration ensues when real-life people actually talk to me. As soon as the conversation becomes more complex than "Goede morgen", "dank u wel" and "alstublieft", my reaction is always a perplexed face and a few words in English, begging the other to repeat in English...

I realise I will never learn Dutch when I think about all the irregularities, and all the words with different meanings. "Waar" means "true" and "where", "weer" means "again" and "weather", "zijn" means "to be" and "his"... But then, I think that Italian uses the same word for "time" and "weather", and suddenly I forgive Dutch people for speaking Dutch.

The truth

After inspecting thoroughly the house where I live, and considering the furniture, the picture hung at the walls, the Indian spices in the kitchen, the presence of a wok in the kitchen cupboard, and the amount of incense sticks in the closet, I have discovered the truth: my landlady is actually an East Asian, enclosed in the body of a Dutch woman.

P.S.: the bike works great again. Next time I won't lose any hair trying to repair it myself. Also, this has re-established some trust in Dutch bike repairers.