A perfect day at Porta Portese flee market

Sunday we went to Porta Portese flee market, it was a terrible weather and we were a bit late

The pros:

It was fast, prices was low, and there was almost no people.

The cons:

Most of the nice things were already packed up in a wan and on its way somewhere. The people in the stalls were much more interested in leaving, than to selling us anything.

But in the end it was a nice walk, even if my shoes made a funny schouupping sound after stepping into a deep puddle of water.

To explain an Earthquake

Much of my Danish family have never experienced an earthquake, and keep asking how it feels. I have thought allot about how to explain it.

It starts likes you get a feeling of vertigo, a bit like sitting in a plane and it makes a small movement, which wasn't expected. A bit like you were sitting in an aeroplane and you didn't discover that it actually took of, and suddenly it made a funny movement. Still with me? then imagine that you are not sitting in an aeroplane but lying in bed or sitting at the dinner table in your living room and the same feeling happens.

The thing is that you don't really know what to do, because it comes with no warning, so I mostly managed just to stay where I am with a bit of a funny expression on my face, unless Sara tells me were to go or what to do.

Well actually the second large earthquake we experienced in Rome (I guess it was the second day or third) we were sitting at the dinner table, I ran out in the doorway in the kitchen, because that where Sara had told me it was safe to stand. Just when it finished Sara came out, look at me and said with a dry voice "Actually that's a pretty stupid place to stay, since they just rebuild the piece of wall above the door, go over there if you are scared"...

Now imagine that you just been on a boat for a long time, you get of and it seems that the earth is still moving. Now instead of the boat image your living room, and instead of a "long time" imagine 20 seconds. For me it takes a couple of hours before I stopped having problems with my balance.

Every rational thought in my brain tells me that nothing will happen, as everybody says, if the Colosseum could stand for 2000 years in Rome, it cant be too bad in Rome, but its still a most unsettling experience, also the second, third, fourth time it happens.

Buona Pasqua a tutti, belli e brutti

Happy Easter to everybody, beautiful and beasts. (well what can I say it rimes in Italian).

The long Friday, or holy Friday is for some reason not a holiday in the booth country. On the other hand I guess the best way to remember the trails of Christ, is to work really hard. So here I am working my day away.

Even if its a working day you are not suppose to eat meat today. In that honor I had myself a pasta with salmon for lunch:

Inventive Parking

Close to were we live there is a pretty famous bar, who should be the queen of Tiramesu ("pick-me-up" in Italian), this creates quite a chaos of traffic at all strange hours of a day. Especially in the mornings and from ten to midnight its crowded, while the rest of the time its only like a normal day just before christmas in front of a shoppingcenter. Putting this in a traffic perspective this means that cars are parked in second, also third row. Its a wide street which can handle most of it. But I guess not everybody loves it:


(on the wall is written << second row is for assholes, and that I would repeat>>.

Historically the graffiti is not something new that young criminals discovered last century but something that is not as far back as the old Romans. Examples of these have been found in Pompeii, where it was mostly used as political propaganda, but also to write any other kind of information like: Pituita me tenet. (which means "I've caught a cold.") or Suspirium puellarum Celadus thraex. ( "Celadus the Thracier makes the girls moan!" (C.I.L. IV, 4397; in the barracks of the gladiators))

Back to the problems of parking, we are actually happy that people park like that, because (like my girlfriend say) how much extra time wouldn't it take to find a parking spot if they decided to go and find legal parking spots. The bar also have a man running around taking care that everybody gets out when they need to, with a nice speaker system that give a bit of a bingo feeling inside.

The thing that bothers me mostly is that the police is always the ones that find the worst parking spots.

Once a week the parking police arrives at this place to give out tickets to everybody who parks outside of the marked areas, this make everybody park exactly as illegal just around the corner, where the parking police doesn't go for some reason. But I guess if they didn't keep people a bit down it would just deteriorate even more. And its not exactly respect for the parking laws that makes people decide where they want to park.

I Slept in a Shaking Bed.

A hand slammed down on my chest, "The bed is moving" my girlfriend said in a tired yet alert voice. Ohhh she is dreaming something funny, so I replied, that I was sure it would stop if she stopped her bicycle dream, and would just lie still.

"Im not moving" she answered, my tired brain worked hard on other "reasonable" theories, so what the f... is the dog doing under the bed, ahh but wait the dog was on "weekend" in a pension, that only left my mother-in-law, who is visiting, but even my tired head couldn't come up with any reasonable stories for what she would be doing under our bed.

Sara said get up, its an earthquake, and before I had time to blink we were standing all three of us in the doorway of the kitchen, to be in the most strong place of the construction of our building, which had turned into something of a rattling toy. It continued only a bit more... time enough for Sara and mum to discuss whether it was safe to go the 2 meters to the left and take a glass of water (It wasn't).

When it stopped we walked in circles a bit, mostly me, as I was the only one who never experienced a earthquake. We turned on the television but non of the channels had any comments, only after some time a news bulletin was written that there had been an earthquake.

Back in bed, I spend quite a lot of time philosophizing about whether the celling was going to come crashing down on me... It didn't and I fell asleep after some time.

What was just a little bit scary for me, turned out to be a disaster, with a terrible number of dead people, and many thousands without a home.

Its epicentre was 100 km away and 10 km underground.

picture borrowed from Corriere della Sera

Spring and the Dog

Spring has arrived in Rome. The Judas threes are flowering, making half the streets of Rome Purple.



Our little apple bonsai has produced a lot of small flowers, which we hope will turn into lots of small uneatable apples some time in the fall.



Its not really time to go swimming at the beach yet..



but SOON :)

And our dog got a room of his own in our apartment:



Sadly it hasn't been enough to make him stop howling like a bad opera singer every time we leave him for five minutes. But at least when he is in his "room" he doesn't eat books, destroy our kitchen or other things.

The strange thing is that a box like that would seem to make it harder to hear him crying outside of our apartment, but on the contrary it almost feels like its amplifying it. In or out of the box, he still drives the neighbours to threaten to call the police and stuff.