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April 1, 2014

10 reasons why Barcelona is better than your city

Yes, I know what you’re thinking.

You’re thinking: WUT?! Is he a travel blogger now?! When did that happen?

As a matter of fact, when I started this blog I wanted it to be massively about travels (seen my posts about Bremen and Turkey already?) but then realized that

A- I don’t have money to travel
B- I’m too anxious about flying to do it often
C- I’m a lazy bum.

Still. Sometimes the planets align and I go places. Posts come out of it.

If you love snowboarding, then you probably also love your snowboard a lot too which is why you want to take good care of it when traveling. Having the best snowboard bags will protect your snowboard from becoming beat up during travel.

1) Because of the new, exciting job opportunities

Obama said he’s planning on creating new jobs, but I doubt they’re going to be AS new and outstanding as the Spanish ones.
See, in Barcelona they took outdated professions such as ~~alchemists badgers jesters~~ ninjas and managed to recycle them into new positions that are actually useful to society.

April 3, 2013

Top 5 German Habits You’ll Pick up (Against Your Will)

Don’t know about you, but I’ve always liked the expression embracing a new culture. It sounds peaceful and reassuring, and when I planned to come to Germany I used to think of myself as a Pocahontas in reverse ready to absorb and confront with open mind and arms this new teutonic world.

I soon realized, though, that if Pocahonts had known about McDonald’s, guns, stuffed turkeys and Zoey Deschanell, she would have probably spared us some songs and filed a couple of complaints. I also realized that there’s times in which you don’t feel as you’re embracing another culture as much as you’re handcuffed to it.

Everybody tells me that Berlin is not representative of Germany, but there’s things, little annoying habits, that I picked up along the way during my expat life in Berlin and they look 100% Deutsch to me. I’m pretty sure you’ll pick them up too if you get to live long enough in this beautiful city.

1) Leaving bottles on the street

My education turned me into a strict recycling machine and the thought of somebody leaving his trash on the sidewalk used to horrify me.
But.
In Germany empty bottles are not trash: they’re money. You go to the supermarket with your empties, a machine sucks them up and returns cash; for an empty bottle they give you up to 60 cents, which you can then reuse to shop.
It’s not very difficult to understand that leaving an empty bottle on the public soil of a relatively poor city is like anonimously delivering donuts to a fat camp. You lay the bottle on the ground, turn one second to your friend who’s trying to decide if the fourth club of the night should be Berghain or Watergate and zac – onomatopoeic italian sound – the bottle is gone.
You kind-of-sort-of-like give to the poor and you also avoid storing another empty at your place.
I mean, the fact that I’m just a couple of Club Mate away from buying myself a car makes me proud, but I can barely see the entrance of my apartment anymore and at this point my only hope is that the crew of Hoarding: buried alive finds me before it’s too late. Read More

May 21, 2012

My first year in Berlin in 10 songs (part 2)

6. caribou – Sun

This is hard to explain, but if you come from a mediterranean country you’ll immediately get why this song has a very tight bond with Berlin. Caribou’s sun is not the warm, reassuring sun you might get to know in Italy. It hides, it lies, sometimes it freezes. It can be an ally as well as an enemy, and you never know when to trust it.
This is the feeling I often get not only about the weather in Berlin, but also about Berlin itself. Sometimes it’s the most welcoming, stimulating city and sometimes it’s a bitch able to shoot you in a colorful supersocial scene as well as to swallow you in a pond of loneliness.

My first year in Berlin in 10 songs (part 1)

1. the war on drugs – Come to the city

I grew up in a small, quiet village and I know the advantages of living in the countryside; I actually come to miss it, every now and then. But at the same time I’ve always known that my place had to be in a dimension where ridiculous, dangerous, unexpected things happen, where stories clash into each other and possibilities are so wide that you can’t even start to imagine them.
The city is definitely my place, and whenever I listen to this song by the War on drugs I immediately flash back to my first months in Berlin. There’s a vibrant, sleepless, alive mood attached to this song and that’s the same mood I got when I used to walk through the streets of Mitte by myself, right after work.

A More Quiet Place