the soupmenu

ENOUGH!!!

everything in the world does not need to be a social networking environment!!!

why do people not understand this?  Sure social networking sites have gained tons of popularity and are now making large amounts of money.  But. in reality, there are only three sites that have created a large-enough database to become sucessfull.  There is no way every social network will do the same.  Look at this…

http://www.nbc.com/Social_Networking/ 

nbc social networking.  yes nbc, i’m that a fanatic of your station where I want to spend an additional 10 hours a day chatting with other random people obsessed with your shows.   Why discuss Heros at the water cooler when I can see discuss with a 18 year old transvestite from Berlin about the show?   Oh wait…i know.  Cause I prefer to talk to real people.   The problem with social networking is that it is all strangers.  You really don’t know who someone is until you actually talk to them in the real, physical world.  Most of human communication is through nonverbal communication….you know, the kind of communication that social networks weed out.  Until you meet someone, it’s just a guess as to who they really are.  So what’s the advantage of ‘connecting’ with people who you will never truly know for real?  If you disagree with me, look through your friends list.  Out of the people who you have met online, do you consider any of them a good friend?  Would you ever loan them your car for a day?  Don’t think so.

Humans are much more than a profile.  Our lives are much more than blog posts and bulletins.  Sure, social networking can be useful, but you can never forget that people love to interact with people, and a computer/website/social network will never replace that.

Sometimes I’m really happy that certain places exist in the world.  Cetona is one of those places.

Roberto and I jumped on a train heading for Cetona.  It’s only an hour and a half train ride from Rome which all made everything that much crazier as this crazy world was quite close to the city.  While on the train, I had the joy of watching a group of fascists walk back and forth on the train so they could shoot up drugs in between the cars all the while singing football songs as well as songs not to favorable to Tuscan girls.  Roberto explained to me that you can recognize extremists by their tight jeans, military boots, and shaved heads, yet you can never tell if they are from the extreme right or the extreme left until you hear them talk.  Guess they do still have something in common.

Roberto’s dad picked us up from the train station and 15 mins later we were in Cetona.  Cetona is one of a bunch of classic medieval towns that are strewn about Tuscany.  Most of the towns are built on a hilltop with a castle in the middle.  In these towns the inhabitants are usually either families who have owned the same house for many generations, or they are rich Italians who can afford to purchase some of the most expensive real estate in Italy.  A sad fact is that small suburbs are being built as the locals are cashing out more and more as the prices go higher and higher.  Some of these towns are kept nicer than others, but the ones like Cetona are simply immaculate.  It’s fascinating how they have managed to keep the classic feel that is hundreds of years old, but they still have all of the advancements of modern technology.  Everyone in town spends extra time, effort, and money to keep things the same way they’ve been for so many years.

While in Cetona, we spent most of the time relaxing, eating, and sleeping.  Life is definitely slower in Tuscany.  The biggest excitement is taking a lazy stroll to the plaza where if you are Roberto you can see about 20 of your relatives who all live in the town.  On Easter Sunday, I had the special treat of having a traditional Italian Eastern meal.  As common with Italian meals, it was split into specific courses. (antipasta, pasta, meat, vegetables, desert, coffee) Everyone eats and completes a course before the next one hits the table.  In a restaurant, you don’t really notice this, but it was quite interesting for me to see people hustle back and forth to the kitchen often during the course of our 3 hour meal.  We had local cheese (amazing), local wine (amazing), and local meat (amazing).  Again, the people of Cetona make sure to keep things as they have been.

We walked around the entire town, had a Sunday drive in the country, and to top it all off, had a picnic with a bunch of friends in an olive field in the countryside…

The whole experience was amazing.  After living in the hustle and bustle of the modern world for a while now, it is great to see that traditional places still exist.  The small town environment really made me miss Watseka, but it was great to see that even across the world, the small town folk are still just as nice, kind, and proud of what they have.

Went to rome. We had a small break for Easter so after a great invite from my roman friend Roberto we jumped on the train and went to rome and Tuscany. The first fun element of our trip is that when we got onto the train we discovered that somehow something got messed up with our ticket order and we had tickets for two days later. As stowaways we spent the first hour of the train ride scavenging for some seats. Could you believe that Roberto had never heard the ‘when in rome…’ phrase? I thought it was one of the most common phrases, and I would assume that romans would love the phrase more than anyone else….yet I guess Americans blow it out of proportion by using it as an excuse for their actions in vegas/nawlins. Once we got to rome, we met up with some of roberto’s friends and headed out to a plaza to drink. One thing roman’s love to do is to buy supermarket beer then go to an ancient plaza and drink the night away while talking to friends. Really it’s no different than the concept of going to a bar and doing the same thing…yet it is still interesting to me to be getting drunk in public surrounded by buildings and fountains that are hundreds of years old.

‘5 cents mini-story’

Hunger struck us so we decided to get a kabob. The guy in front of us in line was paying for his kabob. He started yelling back and forth with the owner. The guy was drunk and was yelling loudly while waving a coin at the owner. After about 5 mins of yelling the owner came from behind the counter and grabbed the guy to throw him out. The guy pushed back and the owner got pulled by others behind the counter. The yelling continued so we realized we weren’t getting a kabob that night. After we stepped outside we hear a crash and realize that that owner scuffled with the guy and threw him into a display case. A moment later the guy is thrown on the street and the owner and his cronies where punching and hitting the guy. All of the Italian women around were letting out blood-curtling yells. They began screaming ‘piove! piove!’, (which means ‘it’s raining’…which is code for cops are coming). The owner stopped hitting the guy, but people were rushing in from everywhere so we got out of dodge. Since I only understood about 3 of the cuss words they were using, I asked Roberto what they were fighting about. Basically the guy was 5 cents short on his kabob, but only had a pound to pay. The owner wouldn’t take the pound and the guy was pissed that he couldn’t get his kabob.

My time in rome was great. The weather was amazing. The city is quite nice. Of course it is everything that everyone makes it out to be. There are ruins everywhere (in fact so much that no one likes to build new things because once they start digging they usually find ruins and then have to bail on the project). I went around and saw the normal sites and had some of ‘the best gelati in rome’, but the best experience was riding around the city on roberto’s moped at night. The city was so calm and beautiful. We went to st. peter’s cathedral at night and waved at the pope. I think it was the only time when I could have been there, as I have an ever increasing hatred for large tour groups. While the huge buildings were great, my favorite structures of the city were the aqueducts. They run throughout the city and it’s amazing to see how the city has grown up around them with the streets running through and buildings being built around them. It reminded me of weeds taking over a sidewalk, yet the modern city was the weed and the aqueducts were the sidewalk. (yet somehow i forgot to take a pic)

Roberto took me to a ‘classic roman’ restaurant. Classic Roman food is not the quintessential pasta found most places. The older food is much meatier and has even more oil than normal Italian food. We drove for a while and ended up on a dead end street to find the restaurant….my kind of place. While walking up you could hear the collaborative chatter of a packed house of roman families. As we walked in, everyone turned to check out the foreigners and debate how they had stumbled into their world. The place had complete small family restaurant feel. Ancient wood ceiling, open faced oven, and old pictures of the city on the walls. We took our seats and overheard the servers fight with each other to who would serve our table as both of them were not confident in their English skills. Roberto told him that he speaks Italian and they were put at ease. The food was amazing. I had a friend broccoli/cauliflower dish that was perhaps the best appetizer that I’ve ever had. It was not breaded and it somehow had a salty yet sweet taste. The broccoli was cooked perfectly tender. I will now spend the next 3 months trying to recreate this dish. I decided to go with a meat sampler for the main dish. This had such wonderful dishes as liver, intestines, and horse tail. Yup…horsetail. It was all delicious. Everything had an oily sauce on it, but each one was different from the next. Another great part of the experience was the service. Italians usually provide horrible service in the first place…but this restaurant is brought service to a new level. The servers would ignore you as long as possible. There were no menu’s so the server would just bark the menu at you in a two-minute spiel which you know they enjoy as much as the dentist. The best part is once our server (classically named alice) took our order for the main dish while smoking a cigarette the whole time.

This post is already too long. I shall stop now and save the story of my Easter in a Tuscan villa for later.

Life updates….

i’ve moved to a new place…..perfect location. I’m really living in the heart of one of the best parts of town. It’s great to be part of a vibrant area of the city. There’s really no reason for people to not visit now.

Salone de mobil is this week so the city is going insane. Nothing but huge exhibitions and parties with free food and booze….as long as you have an invite or can convince the doorman that you are a designer (I’m one for one so far)

Under a month until I’m home for a week-long visit. I’m so excited that I already have most meals planned out. I can’t wait to see everyone as I miss you all very much.