"A buon intenditor poche parole"

Ciao! Today, I found some pics and I uploaded them, yeah! I think some Chinese guy told "one picture is worth one thousand words", so today you'll have the occasion to read a lot in this blog!

La cucina italiana
I'd like to speak about a few typical things that you can find in - almost - every italian kitchen.

First af all, the pastas. It isn't a secret anymore, Italian people like pastas! At every normal meal, you can have pastas. Usually, Italian meals are composed of three or four dishes :

• primo piatto : pastas or rice with some saus
• secondo piatto : meat
• contorno : vegetables (cold or warm)
• dessert
  

Then, another Italian tradition : the coffee machine ! Italian people are coffee lover and coffee addicted, and I understand why. Indeed, their coffee is really small, but quite strong and very tasty...
But I'm still wondering why they use this old coffee machine at the era of automation, electronics and whatever.


Another ingredient typically Italian : the Nutella! I didn't know it before, but Nutella is from Italy! OK, I'd have had to guess it during the international evening of the PM, when the Italian BESTies brought Nutella (I won't tell you what they did with it, I prefer to let you guess)...


And last, and least, cultural shock of the Italian kitchen : this brilliant place where you put all the plates without having to dry them !

"Chi pò, non vò; chi vò, non pò; chi sà, non fà; chi fà, non sà; e così, male il mondo và"

La notte
Finally, I managed to find some time to speak about an important aspect of the Erasmus life : the night life ;-) ! Here you are a few facts about Torino by night.

First of all, from a (stupid) material point of view, making parties and going out in Torino is much more expensive than in Louvain-la-Neuve. You can forget the beers at 80 cents... A good solution is to make a pre-party, at somebody's place, to drink a little bit/a bit/a lot (choose your option) and then to go out.

Till now, I went out with Erasmus students and/or BESTies. Thanks to them, I discovered a very nice bar, the Bellini, where you can have cheap and very good cocktails. If I remember well, at the beginning the BESTies of Torino showed us (Raido, Martin - two Estonian guys - and myself) this bar, and now we're trying to convince as much Erasmus as possible to come here.
But the most interesting part of this bar is to look at the barman, Alessandro, making the cocktails. I hope to put a video here to show you that ASAP.

All the parties occured mainly around via Po (one of the most beautiful and touristical street of Torino) and in the Murazzi, a street along the Po (the Po is the main river in Torino).

Yep, I forgot another problem : there isn't public transport anymore after 1 a.m., so you've to go back by foot. Anyway, it's quite funny to come back at home when you're a little bit drunk and when you're not alone. It's like a city rally in an empty city : you pass through desert places illuminated only for you ! I really missed my camera at this time...


Well, I notice that all this paragraph really needs some pics ; I'll try to add them next time ! Ciao !

"Se non è vero, è ben trovato"

Hey ! After almost one week without any news, I found a little bit of time to write again some - amazing, of course - facts about Torino.
So, let's start !


La pioggia (the rain)
Brussels (and Belgium in general) and Torino have - at least - one point in common : the rain !
Yes, even in Italy, this (supposed) sunny country, it can rain ! Indeed, since I'm here (i.e. about three weeks), it rained already twice...
However, the rain in Belgium lasts usually maximum two or three hours, but in Torino it seems to rain during one or two days ! To conclude this
very interesting paragraph, I'd like to say that Torino isn't the ideal city for depressive and sun-addicted people ;-)


La Questura
Another amazing point for me (you can notice that I'm quite quickly amazed) was the Questura.
But before to explain you what is the questura, I'll ask you a question : according to you, how long can stay an EU-citizen in an EU (Schengen) country ?
Maybe you'd answer that every EU citizen can stay as long as he wants in a foreign country that belongs to the European Union and that has ratified the Schengen agreement - at least it was my first answer before to come in Italy...
Actually, you can't stay more than 1 months, otherwise you've to go to the immigration office, Questura in Italian.

Well, why am I telling you this uninteresting facts ? I was only trying to start to explain how to spend a (or 2) wonderfull afternoon(s) in Torino : just go to the questura for taking your residence permit !

First of all, take several bus/tram and walk to arrive - at the opening or even better before - to the questura. Once there, take a ticket, and wait for at least one or two hours... You can't imagine how funny it can be ! It's like waiting a bus in the middle of nowhere, during a long while, and thinking about all the - other - great things you could do during this while.



Secondly, if one afternoon isn't enough for you, you can do the same as I did : go there one hour before the closing, notice that there isn't any ticket anymore, meet another Estonian Erasmus student (waiting for his turn already since two hours) telling you that you had to arrive
at least one hour ago, speaking a little bit with him and finally meeting another Erasmus student from Louvain-la-Neuve. Then you can go back and thinking about the shortness of the life...


The Politecnico
As you guess, the Politecnico is the Engineering school of Torino. It seems to be quite famous in Italy, because I've met already
several students from the South of Italy coming here for their studies. I took a picture to let you imagine a little bit the building
where I follow the lectures :

Yes, it looks like a prison !

The courses have already started since one week, right ? Hopefully, during the first period (there're four periods in one academic year)
I've only two courses, and about 12 hours per week (who told TIME was hard ?;-) - that's not too much, right ?

The first course is more or less "Stochastic Modelisation"(mais en nettement moins chiant, pour les mataps qui lisent ce blog... ou pas) and is quite interesting, right ?

However, the second course is about the interaction between electromagnetic field and the matter ; I let you imagine how it's boring, right ? Till now, the only two things I remember about this course are :

1. I'll try to find ASAP another course instead of this one ;
   
2. the teacher says always "right ?" (giusto ?) at the end of his sentences.

OK, that's unfortunately all for today. Not because I don't know what to add (actually I should really skip those not-so-interesting infos and focuse on the main business : the city and the night life !) but rather because I've not enough time...

Buonanotte !

"Chi va piano, va sano e va lontano."

After one week in Torino...
... what could I tell you ? I don't know, there are so many things that happened since my arrival in Torino. Well, I'll try to think about Torino, to order a little bit all the things that pops up in my mind, and then to write it.


Torino ?
After a long time of intensive searchs (30 seconds max), I'm now able to explain you a little bit the history of the city of Torino, aka Turin. So, let's start the quotation marks and give the word to a famous anonymity : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turin.
Now we can close the quotation marks and thank a lot this nice guy/girl for having share all his/her knowledge !

To summarize, you should know about Torino that :

• "Torino" means "little bull" in Italian (it's why the symbol of the city is a bull) ;
• the automobile company FIAT (Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino), the vermouth Martini and a lot of other things are from Torino ;
• Torino hosts the Winter Olympics in 2006 ;
• Torino is the capital of Piedmont ;
• almost 1 million of people live in Torino ;
• Torino is an industrial city, but I'd like to add that it's however also a beautiful city.
  

Finding an apartment
That's for sure the most difficult part when you arrive in Torino. There are several ways to (try to) find a lodging in Torino :

• asking a room in one of the residences of the University : because there aren't enough rooms for all the students, it's more than probable that you'll have to find a room by yourself...
• advertisements on the walls of Polito (corso Duca degli Abruzzi, 24)
• Sportellocasa : a kind of free agency for the students, that can help you to find a room
• torino.bakeca.it : a website where you can put and read some advertisements for flats, rooms, etc.

Moreover, because the accommodation are quite expensive, a lot of students live in double
rooms ("camere doppie"), but you can also find some single rooms ("camere singole") as we're
used to have in Belgium.

By the way, I'd like to thank another time Katia and her family for their hospitality. It
really helped me a lot !


Filling all the administrative forms
As usual when you go abroad for a long time, there're several administrative stuffs to do. I guess it's a kind of way to make busy the foreign students who arrived before the start of the lectures ?
However, don't worry for that : at the arrival meeting you receive a survival guide well done where you can find all the informations needed. Actually I didn't expect a so good organisation, at least with regard to the adminisrative things.


Eating
First of all, I can ensure you that the italian food (cucina italiana) is one of the best of the world ! at least IMHO...
OK, even if italian food is very varied, I have to admitted that I ate already so many pizzas here that I can't remember how many I ate already in 1 week.

Hopefully, for the lazy and quite bad-cooker students as me, God (or the Italian people) invented the Mensa ! "La Mensa" is a restaurant/canteen of the university, as it exists in Belgium and in many other countries, but with a huge difference : here the food is good !
Moreover, there is a discount for the foreign students. In conclusion, you can find good and
cheap food, so what should you cook ?
However, because I'm not always lazy, I really want to (and I will) learn how to cook some Italian dishes (no, a frozzen pizza isn't considered as a real dish) during my 2 years here !

Another important thing to know about the food in Torino is the "aperitivi" (aperitifs). OK,
I'm sure you'll tell me that it exists also in your country, but the idea here is a little bit different.
Firstly, the aperitivi here aren't peanuts and chips : it's several dishes of pastas, vegetables, meat, seafood and fruits.
Secondly, if you come during the evening in some bars in Torino, you pay a drink (around 5€) and you can eat as much aperitivi as you want. So the aperitivi are also a good and cheap way to eat here !




The strike (lo scioppero)
After one week in Torino, I wasn't lucky : the day I had to move in my new apartment, it rains all during the day and - last but not least - there was a public transportation strike ! Yeah !

Parli italiano ?
If your motherlanguage is French (or any other Latin language, Spanish for instance), it shouldn't be too difficult to learn Italian ! If you don't know an Italian word, you can just use the French word and add "o" or "a" at the end. In this way you find, with a probability of 50%, the right Italian word !

Personally, I followed last year an Italian course, and I'm quite surprised of my Italian level. The biggest problem is that the Italian speak really fast sometimes, thus it becomes quite hard to understand anything...

Otherwise, Polito (Politechnico of Torino) provides an Italian course for the foreign students, but - at least from my point of view - it isn't really useful ; the only good thing is that this course is a good way to meet other Erasmus and foreign students...



OK, I think that's all for today. The next times I'll try to speak about the cities, Polito, the night life, the LBG of Torino and I don't know yet what else.