A suggestion from my beer pusher

My new beer pusher is a shop, close to the church of Basilica di San Giovanni. The shop is pretty small and can be found in a small side street. The nice thing is that it is a bit like going to the supermarket for something else, like say the wine section or cheese section, It has rows and rows of different kinds of beers, from sweet light beer to heavy dark beer. So like the supermarket with lots of choices, only you would have too take away all the food sections.. And well, all the other sections :). They have wine too, but this is still to be tested. (you would think that I had written this after drinking beer, but its just the heat which is killing me.)


Anyway yesterday I was there to buy a nice beer to enjoy at home with my beautiful girlfriend. So it shouldn't be brown bread added water (like I often drink it) and the heat is also putting a bit of a damper on my dark beer tendencies, so with the good counsel of the beer man we found a nice Belgian beer called: (like) La Rulles Blonde.

The thing, which is a bit strange for me is the fact that many people arrive at the shop to buy beers and then stand around outside to drink them with friends and stuff (so far I'm there), but for a good Dane (who probably drinks more than one) I don't understand how they handle the lack of toilets?!? Maybe that they just don't drink that much... hmm I shall investigate.... They also had another nice blond beer that I could go and drink while I investigate the habits of the beer drinkers.

Jubii it looks like rain

The sky is gray, and the air is full of humidity.

 

I really hope we will get some rain, to cool of the city a bit, and to wash off all the dust.

A bus on a schedule?

Had a quick trip to the mother country this weekend. And had a nice experience, which seems very strange for a person living in Rome.

I took the bus going into the centre of Aarhus (nice town, you should go there). The bus was far from full, it was new and clean. And then it was a bit ahead of schedule, so at every stop, it stopped and waited until the scheduled departure time arrived. Even if nobody was getting of or on...

So cool!

(from Flickr)

Is it custom in your culture...

- "Scusi parli inglese?"... I was sitting in the metro, on my way to Italian class, fighting my way through an italian giallo - crime story.
- "Erhmm scusi", I looked up and saw the American woman sitting next to me,
- "Scusi parli inglese?",
- "Si, I speak inglese" a bit confused.. "Im not Italian",
- "But you speak English?" she answered/asked - Couldn't help wondering if those two things were contradicting for her...

She then asked "Is it customary in your culture to get up for old people in the metro".
(My culture ?!?!) "Yes" I answered "Its considered pretty rude not to".

Then she started waving at a woman, which mostly looked offended that the American was considering her as an old woman. The "old" woman refused.

As I started to get up to exit at Termini, I told the poor confused American that tomorrow the metro would be closed because of strike.
- "ohh" she said "for how long will it be closed?".
- "only from 8.30 until 17.00",
- "only tomorrow?",
- "yes"
- "but that doesn't make sense?"
- "No".
- "but why do they do it?",

- "That is privileged information, which almost never reach the public".

She looked confused. I told her "In my culture, its like that"... and Got off the train.

An Antipasto speciality in southern parts of Italy.

Southern as in the Basilicata region, I was there for a client meeting with work. And any good Italian business meeting is also a nice excuse for going out to have a nice lunch.



As Antipasto was served grilled red peppers. Which should be a speciality for the area. They were very crunchy and tasted great. Afterwards followed a plate of grilled meat with fresh salad and parmigiana cheese, seasoned with balsamic vinegar.



Having been to Sicily I had expected to landscape of Basilicata to be a bit like the ones you see in the old western movies with Terence Hill. But instead it was green like the northern regions of Italy.



Mouthing my concerns, one of the other attendees at the lunch explained that it would be more like that going toward the sea. Keeping to the movie perspective, we did find some apartment structures which would have been perfect in the new Terminator film:

When you are stuck in traffic...

When you are stuck in traffic I guess a horse is actually faster.





They are also much nicer to look at than the soldier who is standing a bit further down the same road with a fully automatic rifle, camouflage clothes, and bullet proof west. Both the soldier and the riding policemen are there to take care of us scared citizens in this national security emergency which Italy has been in since Berlusconi and his toughs have risen to power. But the solider seems quite a bit more out of place...

The pictures are however also proof that my girlfriend is a good photographer. We were almost passing the horses in our car when I threw her my cellular phone telling "take a picture quickly".

Trip down south

I had a customer meeting the other week in Potenza, Basilicata:


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Five hours of meeting in return for 10 hours of train travel - cant really say that public transportation in the southern parts of Italy is the best.

But the train was okay. Even if I had a compatibility problem with the window. It had a metal bar going across the window, which gave me two possibilities if I wanted to enjoy the landscape; either sitting on my luggage as a huge baby chair or lying down in the seat, neither of which were really comfortable...



I had brought my old pocket camera, which was top of the top in 2003 but now is both slow and not too sharp in the pictures. So when I passed the aqueducts I was almost too late



At the left side of the picture you can glimpse one of the aqueducts which supported ancient Rome with water, back in the days when it was the centre of the world.

Aqueducts with boiling water was supposedly some of the first signs of warning back in year 79 AD. when the suspected super Vulcano Vesuvio covered Pompii and area with many meters of ashes.



That day everything seems quiet enough. According to Wikipedia it is today regarded as one of the most dangerous vulcanos in the world, due to the fact that there is more than 3.000.000 people living almost on top of it.

After passing Napoli, and Salerno I did start feeling like I wanted to sit on my bag. Both my sweet girlfriend and my colleague had told me many scary stories about how the different types of gangs would get on the train only to rob poor defenceless people.

Nothing happened though, and we arrived to the horrible town of Potenza, without any problems.