"A chi dai il dito si prende anche il braccio"

Today, nothing special... except a cultural and musical paragraph! So, here you are some links to nice (free AND legal) videos :

• Boten Ana (basshunter) : song number 1 in the Scandinavian and Dutch charts ;
  
• Los Angeles (Malibu Stacy) : song number 10000 in the Belgian charts, but really good (IMHO) ;
  
• Ordinary life (Liquido) : Liquido, you know, the German rock band who made Narcotic ?
  

Jag känner en bott, hon heter Anna, Anna heter hon
Och hon kan banna, banna dig så hårt
Hon röjer upp i våran kanal
Jag vill berätta för dig, att jag känner en bott

"Morto un papa se ne fa un altro"

Hello !

After a great travel to the Questura (for the third time), I got my residence permit (it's like a sheet with some nice colors and stamps) . Yeah!


What else ? I wrote all the text about LLM, and started to upload the pictures. I hope to finish it at the end of this weekend. Buono fine settimana!

Low Lands Meeting 2006 in Eindhoven

Before to start to explain you the Low Lands Meeting, I'd like to write a few numbers :
3 (days : from friday to sunday), 2 (nights), 7 (hours of sleep during those three days), 170 (participants), 10 (Local BEST Groups : Eindhoven, Ghent, Leuven, Brussels (VUB and ULB), Louvain-la-Neuve, Liège, Paris (Ecole Centrale and ENSAM), Nancy), 40 (cents, the price of one Hollandia).

Now, I can start !

Thursday 19th

Once upon a time, I left rainy Torino (thursday 19th) for still more rainy Bergamo, going to a youth hostel - good and cheap BTW. There I met another Erasmus (a Spanish guy, from Saragossa, but studying in Viena) and spent one night before to go to the airport of Milano-Bergamo.

Nice view of Bergamo, from the railway station. You can't see them, but in the back there are green hills. It's really beautiful.

Friday 20th

The Alps mountains. I think (but I'm not sure at all) you can see the Mont Blanc.

A big lake somewhere between Italy and Switzerland (one bottle of limoncello for the one who gives me the right name).

In the morning (friday 20th), the weather was still cloudy in Bergamo, but anyway I was leaving Italy and going to Netherlands, where the weather was - exceptionnaly - better (i.e. not rainy and even a bit sunny !).
So, arrival at the airport of Eindhoven, travel to the station, lunch, and trip to the Technical University of Eindhoven (TU/e).

The main building of TU/e.

The Netherlands, the country of the bikes...

In the main building of TU/e, you can easily find the BEST office : just ask to somebody, or look at the messy office downstairs. Actually, when I saw it, I thought about my sister's room during exams (that is a lot of mess, not easy to imagine). You can find almost everything there : computers, fridge, chairs and divan, maps, deodorant and several kind of alcohol (and Hollandia beer of course !).

The BEST office of Eindhoven...

... where you can find (almost) everything!

A trolley full of Hollandia. Now, you mutliply it by a huge factor, and you get the amount of beer for the LLM.

Initially, the participants coming by train (or by plane as me) had to go to the Eindhoven station, then take a bus till the middle of nowhere, and then call an organiser to pick up them from this bus stop and bring them in place called "rukbunker".

The rukbunker

Tents close of the rukbunker (there was not enough place there for 170 people).

Dear reader, because this blog has also an educational goal, and also because most of you don't speak Dutch (or not well enough) I'll explain you what "rukbunker" means before to continue this story. Open the brackets.

In Dutch from the Netherlands, when you want to speak about a place in the middle of nowhere, you add "ruk-" before the name of the place. So, "rukbunker" means "the bunker in the middle of nowhere". Actually, it's not really a bunker, it's a kind of farm, but very rustic ("back to the basics" was a part of the slogan of the LLM...). For instance, there was only three showers for all the 170 participants, and I won't speak too much about the toilets...

However, in Flemish (i.e. the Dutch from Flanders, the Northern part of Belgium), "ruk" is coming from the verb "rukken" that means "to masturbate". So, I let you translate "rukbunker"...

I thank Jan for this explanation, that permited me to understand the little subtilities existing bewteen Dutch and Flemish.


OK, now we can close the brackets and continue the story. On this beautiful friday 20th of October, all the public transports were working well, except - of course - the buses from the railway station of Eindhoven till the LLM place because of a short strike. Now, you can maybe understand why I want a car when I'll finish my studies!

Anyway, as I said before, I was in the BEST office of Eindhoven, where I staid at least three or four hours. What could you do there? A lot of things, like :

• drink a Hollandia from the fridge,
• try to prepare a bit the BEST Knowledge Transfert by mail with Salua,
• prepare the 170 survival guides and welcome packs.
  

Just to print and to staple the survival guides, we (Sjoerd, Rudy and myself) spent at least one hour. The kind of thing everybody should do at least once in his/her life to enjoy more the life afterward.

Sjoerd (Dutch) and Rudy (Austrian) busy with the magic machine, spending about 1 hour for making 170 the survival guides...

After all this great moment, it was time to leave Eindhoven and to go to the rukbunker. There, after a - unexpected - good dinner (pasta, nothing very different than my current Italian diet) and the arrival of more or less everybody, we were ready to start the party (and also to prepare the trainings, case studies and knowledge transfer sessions of the saturday) till early in the morning (around 5 or 6 a.m.).

Let's start the party!

Céline (LLN), Jean (LLN), Jan (Bxl), Emilie (Bxl), me, Shreg (LLN)

Saturday 21th

As usual in BEST events, the moto "work hard, party hard" was respected. In practice, it means firstly : wake up, shower and breakfast at 8 a.m.! Then case study about how to organise a Summer Course (easy : just be sure that there are enough old and experienced members ;-), followed by a travel to TU/e. There, BEST knowledge transfer (i.e. explaining to the newbies how works BEST), lunch and presentation of one of the sponsors of the event.

BKT session (yes, we don't party all the day!)

Afterwards, something more interesting (I agree, I'm speaking like an alcoholic, but I'm not) : the drink with the representants of the sponsor company.

The drink after the presentation of the company

The afternoon was already almost finished, but we had to wait for the bus bringing the second group to the rukbunker.
But what can we do after a drink ? Another drink for sure ! This time, it was without the representants of the company, in front of the BEST office. Let about 50 BESTies together, cheap beers and wait at least one hour. At the end, you can hear sweet songs in the TU/e building, and also in the bus (look at here and here).

BESTies from Eindhoven, providing the beers during the second drink.

Xavier (Fr), Nicolas (Fr), Jeannette (Finnish), singing some unfamous Finnish/French drinking song during the second drink...

Finally, we arrived at the rukbunker, ate some fries, had a speaker corner (I write it in a few words, but actually arrival+dinner+speaker corner last two or three hours) and started the International Evening (IE).
The principle of an International Evening is quite easy : everybody brings typical food and drink from its country, you play some music and that's all. It's the most famous evening in BEST. Almost every BEST event has an IE.

International Evening !

Louvain est là, chalalalala!

DJ Egbert!

Sunday 22th

Like on Saturday, wake up, shower and breakfast around 8 (maybe 9) a.m. Unfortunately for me, it was already time to say goodbye and to go to the airport. The end isn't very funny : flight Eindhoven-Milan, bus Milan airport-Milan central station, train Milan-Turin.

I know, it was maybe a bit expensive (in time and money) to spend only one weekend at the LLM, but I can ensure you that you should go there to feel what I felt!
Thanks again to LBG Eindhoven for this weekend!

Goodbye Eindhoven !

"Tutte le strade portano a Torino"

Italy is the best country of the world, Turin is the most sunny city of Italy and that's why all the roads are going to Torino. Don't try to find some meaning for this sentence, there's no meaning ; it's just another meaningless sentence in this blog...


Il mercolato della Porta Palazzo
On saturday, I went to the "biggest open-air market in Europe" (sic)! So, how is it? Boh, it's like a market, but big, with a lot of shops, fruits and vegetables. BTW it's really cheap and open all the week except on sunday, so if you're gonna in Torino go there !

Because an image is worth one thousand words, and also because I don't know what to add, I put here a few pictures...






How to learn Italian if you speak French ?
This paragraph is designed for the Frenchspeaking people who'd like to switch easily from French to Italian and look interesting and intelligent by telling some words in Italian ;-)
So, I'll write it in French...

Comme vous le savez sûrement, le français et l'italien sont des langues latines. D'où pas mal de points communs, des mots fort semblables, environ la même syntaxe grammaticale (wow, comment ça le fait quand je commence à utiliser des mots savants !) et des conjugaisons assez proches.

Le français et l'italien, c'est un peu comme les équations différentielles ordinnaires et les équations différentielles partielles (allez, j'en rajoute encore une couche !), la transformée de Laplace et celle de Fourier (bon, ça suffit maintenant !), la Carapils et la 365, un cours de Rollin et un cours de Magnus (tous les deux aussi incompréhensibles), le champagne et le spumante, Ozone et Bassunter, la compil' Top Hits '95 et Top Hits '96.

Mais le français sans l'italien, c'est comme la mer sans les vagues, c'est comme les vagues sans l'écume, c'est comme l'écume sans le sel, c'est comme le sel sans le poivre. Bref, c'est comme l'amour sans amour ; et l'amour sans amour ce n'est plus de l'amour!

Enfin, je m'égare, et j'oublie la leçon de français-italien! Cette leçon c'est plus quelques observations faites sur le tas. Donc n'espérez pas être parfais bilingue après les lignes suivantes. Tout au plus vous pourrez essayer de deviner un mot italien à partir d'un mot français.

Règle	Exemple
tion devient zione	information devient informazione
ct devient tt	optimisation devient ottimizzazione
y devient i	dynamique devient dinamica
xp devient sp	expression devient espressione
bs devient ss	observateur devient osservatore

...	se prononce ...
c + i/e	tch (ex : ciao se prononce tchao)
c + consonne ou o/a	k (ex : ecologia)
ch	k (ex : dinamiche se prononce dinamiké)

Cucina italiana : lesson 1 : how to cook spaghettis ?
Thanks to this wonderful blog, I'll try to give you all the knowledge about kitchen that my Italian flatmate try to teach me! I think it won't be easy, but hopefully I'm here for two years!

So, let's start with the basics of Italian cooking : how to cook pasta ?

First of all, you've to know that Italian people don't put oil in the water. Never do that in front of an Italian person, (s)he could (almost) kill you. So, how do they manage to cook pasta without oil? They just put big salt when the water is boiling. Then they put the pasta, wait a few minutes and that's all.

PS : student (but not Italian) trick to see if your pasta are ready : take one spaghetti and throw it on a wall. If the spaghetti sticks to the wall, it means that your spaghetti are ready!

"In bocca al lupo"

After "une bonne petite gueule de bois" (a headache) this morning (due to the chupitos and Venezuelian shots abuse), two hours of course (so much ;-) and a running of 13 kilometers (I don't feel my legs anymore), I'm ready to tell you the fabulous story of my life in Torino! Hum, in other words, I'll still use this blog as a personal therapy to throw all I've in my head.

The chupitos... ahh, my head

So, today, I'll speak about : tiramisu, Belgo-Colombian meeting, spaghetti carbonara, beers, Low Lands Meeting and Italian TV. Let's go!

Spaghetti carbonara, tiramisu and Belgo-Colombian meeting
Yesterday I invited Luz and my flatmate Nicola (an Italian student) to try my experimental cooking for the lunch.
Maybe you're wondering who is Luz (maybe not, but anyway I'll tell you who she is). Luz is a Colombian girl, who arrived in Torino three years ago for an exchange program (like Erasmus but with South America) and started a PhD two years ago. I met her in Lödz, in Poland, about two years ago, with about twenty other fantastic people, during a BEST Summer Course - where we learnt a lodz of things, but I only remember how to say in Polish "you've beautiful legs, especially the left one"). It's so great to meet again somebody you met such a long time ago!


For this historical South America - Europa meeting, I cooked a beautiful tiramisu and spaghetti carbonara! Yeah! You can't imagine how proud I was (after four years of mainly frozen pizzas/lasagne/kebab/petits plats de Maman as meals)!

Tiramisu (already partly eaten...)

The end of the beers at 80 cents ;-(
One month and a few days after my arrival in Torino, I can start to think about the advantages and disadvantages of Torino compared with Louvain-la-Neuve (LLN). I won't enumerate all the good points of Torino, it could be too long (and I'm also lazy now).

Even if I wasn't used to go out very often in LLN, I see a big disadvantage of Torino compared with LLN : the quality and the price of the beers. Italy isn't famous for its beers, so I won't speak about the quality of the Italian beers compared with the Belgian ones. Hopefully, about the second point (the price of the beers), I'll have a temporary solution : Low Lands Meeting (LLM) !

*Low Lands Meeting*, by LBG Eindhoven
The Low Lands Meeting is an internal (i.e. only for BEST members) BEST event. It is a Regional Meeting (RM) who gather BESTies (BEST members) from Belgium (there are six local groups, with about twenty members per group), the Netherlands (one local group in Eindhoven) and North of France. So, more than 150 of crazy people will meet during one weekend (19th-21st of October) for discussing, following trainings, discovering what's BEST, having fun and... drinking Hollandia !

As you fortunately don't know, Hollandia is the name of a cheap dutch beer (as Cara in Belgium, but a lot worse). Actually the only good point of this beer is its price. So, instead of expensive but not-too-bad Italian beers, I'll get very cheap but not good beer during three days.

Anyway, as I wrote before, it's gonna be a lot of fun!


The Italian TV
Have you ever wondered how could be the TV of the country of Leonardo da Vinci, Dante Alighieri, Michelangelo, Ciceron, Machiavel, Ovide, Umberto Eco and a lot of other exceptional personalities ?
Actually, Italian TV is : shitty and machist. Shitty because I don't count all the stupid reality TV shows happening now, even on the public television (la Rai). Machist, because in almost all the shows (not yet in the TV news) there's a cute woman, in bikini, doing nothing. She is there only to be seen. OK, I don't say that I don't like it (even if I'm not watching TV very often, there are so many better things to do here) but I think it's quite stupid...

"Tra il dire e il fare, c'è di mezzo il mare"

Hey everybody !

This time, I've more inspiration : I can see the sun of Liguria, feel the water of the Mediteranean sea and the sand of Savona, hear Elsi voice, smell the Italian kebab and taste the spumante of the Lidl! That was more or less the program of my last Saturday...


Il sabato a Savona
After a hard wake up at 8 am and a little rush in the station of Porta Nuova to buy the ticket and get the train, I finally take a seat in the wagon with Pierre piccolo, Pierre grande, Elsi, Katrine and Lina. Destination : Savona, in Liguria, in the South of Torino, on the Italian seaside. Let's leave rainy Torino and go to sunny Savona for one day, doing... nothing.

Look as we are happy to leave rainy Torino !

After more than two hours of train and a short lesson of Finnish (for your culture : cheers = kippis, thank you = kiitos, hi = hei/moi/terve/päivää), we arrive at the station of the wonderful city of Savona! The program is quite easy : look for the beach, go to the beach, stay on the beach, and that's all! I know, it could seem so boring (actually it's what I thought before), but when you've Elsi with you during a whole day, it can't be boring. I don't know at all what the Finnish people eat, but I believe there are a lot of vitamins and other energetic stuffs in their food.



So, after a very busy morning, an awful kebab and another busy afternoon (with walking in the unhistorical center of Savona, visiting of the local Lidl, spumante tasting and sitting on the beach), we meet other Erasmus (Nicolas, Jennifer, Delphine, Gabor, Attila, Petra). At the end of the day : sitting one more time on the beach, drinking some no-so-soft drinks and eating.

Actually, you can see only 4 people on those 2 pictures, but we were about 10 in a whole wagon ; I let you imagine the mess it was ;-)

Finally, we go back to Torino (arrival around midnight) - surprise, the travel is still longer than in the morning ! -, make a picnic in the train (the ticket inspector didn't seem to like it a lot).


One month ago...
I arrived in Turin! I knew a bit Italian but never had never spoken Italian, I knew pastas but had never cooked it well (i.e. according to the Italian way), I went in Italy but had never been in Turin, etc.
Actually, I don't remember all the things I did/didn't do before Turin, but it's quite hard to realise that I arrived here only one month ago. It's paradoxal : on one hand everything is going very fast (you spent one week as it was one day), on the other hand it looks like I arrived here six months ago.


Anyway, I'll use this occasion to show you something a little bit more interesting that my life : Superga! I went there one month ago, with Katia's father.
As its name doesn't tell it, Superga is a hill nearby Turin, with a beautiful basilica. When the weather is nice (and when there is no smog), you can have a nice view on Turin.



Il Bellini
After a long time of thinking (30 sec), I managed to reduce the size of the video of the Bellini (you know, this nice cocktail bar on via Po). So, here you are the video.


Short Italian course
Cazzo! I've ancora forgotten to go to the lectures! Però, it wasn't davvero a problem, perché I was too much sleepy this morning. Cosi, I could sleep more, quindi I'll can go to the party tonight!

The goal of this stupid paragraph wasn't to describe any possible student situation, but to try to show you how much some little Italian words can change the sound of a sentence. According to me, Italian sounds like music, and I think this is partly due to those nice (and not so nice also) little words.

"Hum, hum" (I really have no imagination today)

Buonasera !

OK, today I'll try to focus on the main reason I'm here : to study mathematics (hum, hum) !
So, I propose you to go quickly here to remember some basic mathematic formulas (merci Mark pr le lien) !


After this little reminder, let's continue with unscientific facts. Yeah !

I'd like to prevent you that I use Google Analytics, a tool like Big Brother that can tell you that the number of visitors of this website is growing exponentially : from zero to nine visits in four days ! Yeah ! It's a growth of about 9*100/4 = (hum, where is my calculator?) = 225 percent !
I can't resist to show you the graph ;-)

OK, there were only three visitors on Thursday, but who cares ;-) ?

Still about totally useless facts, I discovered a few days ago how to make panoramic pictures with my camera ! So, here you're two wonderful pics :

The nice view I can see from my balcon...

Some Erasmus students...

And for the end, here you're a nice picture that will finish this disastrous paragraph without any imagination...

Helene (Sweden), Coen (Netherlands), Pierre (France), Matthias (Sweden, hidden by Pierre), Anne (Switzerland), me, Pietjan (Belgium), Gerlinde (Belgium), Erik (Norway) and Steven (Belgium). Thanks to Steven (and Pepe Jeans) for his hospitality !

"Dare a Cesare quel che è di Cesare"

Il Bellini
If you've the occasion to go in Turin, and to stay at least one night there, I advice you to walk along via Po. Why? Firstly, it's a nice street, starting from the center of Turin (Piazza Castello, also really nice place) and ending on the Po.

Secondly, as several typical Italian streets, there arcades ; useful in case of rain !
Thirdly, via Po ends on the Po, more precisely on the Murazzi. It's an area with a lot of bars and discos (with free entrance, but not free at all exit !). So you'll maybe have to follow this street if you want to go to some discos.

Last, but not least, you'll find the best cocktail bar I saw till now in Torino : the Bellini ! As I said already a few days ago, the cocktails are quite cheap but very good there. Moreover, the barman is realy good. The best way to be convinced is to look at the video !

"Chi troppo vuole, nulla stringe"

Buonasera !

Finally, it seems that this blog is becoming a real blog, i.e. updated more or less every day ! Today, a lot of philosophical thoughts about life, Italian spirituality and architecture.

No, actually I think I'll just put some pictures and add a few comments... Anyway, enjoy !

Language mixing theory
It's the first time in my short life that I've had the occasion to (try to) speak four different languages during only one day :

• French (motherlanguage),
• English (learnt at school, spoken and improved a lot in BEST),
• Italian (learnt last year and spoken here),
• Dutch (learnt at school and unfortunately almost never practised in the real life).
  

As you can guess, Italian is the language of... Italy ! So, all my lectures are in Italian (that's quite hard when the teacher speak normally - i.e. fast for me), and it's the main language I speak with my flatmate, Nicola (student of Polito too) and when you ask some infos in the street (like "Vorrei andare a...", "Dov'è ...", "Quant'è ?", "Grazie", "Ciao", "Sono uno stupido studente Erasmus, e non parlo bene italiano", etc.)

I speak French mainly with the French and Belgian Erasmus students here, but also sometimes with a few Italian people learning or speaking French.

English is naturally the most used language with the Erasmus, and also sometimes with my academic advisor.

Sometimes, I try to speak also Dutch (or Flemish, it's the same) with some Belgian Erasmus. I said "try to speak", not "speak fluently". Indeed, it's a pitty (or maybe a shame), but I'm not able to really speak the motherlanguage of the half of the population of Belgium !
Anyway, after a lot of courses at school but a lack of practice, I still remember the basics and I'm able to express myself ;-) However, sometimes I need a lot of concentration to find some words. So, this kind of conversation looks like :
"Hello. Last day, I ... went to Piazza Something, because... ... (you can notice the double "...", i.e. a long while, due to the difficult sentence construction in dutch after because-omdat) I wanted to visit that thing"


Moreover, as I said before, some days I switch from French to Dutch, then from Dutch to Italian, and finally to English. I can ensure you that it's very hard, and it happens (especially in the morning when I'm still sleepy) that I use some English words in a Dutch sentence.

After a long thinking time (ten minutes), I discovered a new theory about languages. Here you are this wonderful theory...
Normal people can learn without too many difficulties two, three or four languages. Unfortunately, as in a computer hard drive, the available space easily and quickly accessible is limited. I drew a little diagram illustrating this idea.
However, when they have to use all those languages in a short while, their brain becomes totally messy. They start to mix several languages, and have some problem to stay understandable. So, to avoid this problem, their brain throw out one of those languages, in order to let more easily-and-quickly-accessible space for one or two languages.
That's my theory. I don't know what do you think about that? Is it some brain-specialist reading this insignificant blog ? If yes, could (s)he give me some comments ?



Torino's night life

Piazza Vittorio Veneto

Piazza Vittorio Veneto (2)

Bridge over the Po. At the end of the bridge, there's a church (Gran Madre di Dio) built to save de bridge from Napoleon

Me, Pierre (France), Katrina (Austria), Vincent (Belgium), Erik (Norway), Mathias (Sweden), Steven (Belgium)

Another group picture, with also Elsi (Finland) and Pierre (France)

Helene (Sweden), me, Delphine (France), Gerlinde (Belgium), Mathias

Church nearby Piazza della Repubblica

Nearby Piazza della Repubblica...