1st January 2010 - buon anno!!

Happy New Year all! And a Happy New Decade too! Goodbye to the noughties.

Lazy day today, watched the end of Series 1 of True Blood and James Bond's "On her majesty's secret service". Naturally, it's raining so we're being lazy today. Last night we went to a friend's place and had an excellent meal and some fun party games. Just the four of us and it was hoofing it down with rain so opted to stay in rather than go to the celebrations in the town square.

Last weekend we went to Marina di Alberese, which is a park on the coast about an hour's drive from here. The region is The Maremma and our tourist guide book was particularly amusing about it...
"
The Maremma was long Tuscany's forgotten corner, its coastal plains, marshes, forest-covered hills and wild, empty upland interior having been a place of exile and fear for much of the last five hundred years: unknown, unvisited and virtually uninhabited. "Only the wild beasts that hate the cultivated fields", wrote Dante, "make their lairs in the Tuscan Maremma." Malaria was the problem, combined with bandits in the interior and pirate attacks on the coast.
"
Lovely words. Dante has his point though - it looked to be a largely uninhabited marshland, but the park was amazing, with pine forests, and specifically umbrella pines, running right down to the water's edge.

My Italian is coming along, but slowly. Not helped by constantly talking English, both at work and at play, and not getting a great deal of exposure to Italian. When I have my 1:1 Italian lessons it's usually in the middle of a really busy day - and I really enjoy them but after an hour of conjugating verbs, well actually, after about 40 minutes my brain is in total meltdown. I seem to have a low Italian processing speed - I can pick up Italian words in sentences better now, but it takes me a couple of seconds for them to be processed post-registering, which means that by the time I've worked out what those two words in one sentence were, I'm already another two sentences behind. But I am enjoying it, when I find time, and, hmmm, flashback - "In every day in every way I'm getting better and better". Where is that from - a Pink Panther film I think. Bit of wikipedia I think. Yes it was definitely from a Pink Panther film and said by the nutty Police chief as he gets out of the sanitarium.
And here is the origin - Emile Coue - a French therapist who investigated the placebo effect.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coue

Food at the restaurant on campus has amused me this week. I have seen that anything and everything in Italy is fine as long as it comes with cheese. Cheese is offered on top of every dish. And if Italians should for some peculiar reason not have cheese with a dish then they will have balsamic vinegar and oil. Result. And then, this week there has been two classically funny dishes - the first was sausages and beans, again it was the baked beans that I had seen before, but in there was some small fat sausages - reminded me of those beans and sausages that you can get in a can, probably Asda own brand. I didn't choose that dish. The second one that really made me laugh was brussel sprouts. Since it was Xmasish, and I'd not had any I felt obliged to have some. The brussel sprouts were well cooked in a bowl, and unlike the other dishes, these already had cheese on top, without it being offered. So I added some balsamic vinegar and they tasted great. Result. As you can probably guess I am getting Huuuuge out here. However, we did solve the access to the gym issue yesterday and now I can get in, so the only thing blocking me now is my own laziness - I can no longer blame it on the ridiculous amounts of paperwork. Darnit!!

Went to karate for the second time this week. Again I enjoyed it very much. I decided to wear my green belt this time, as instructed to by sensei, which placed me about half way along the class. The dojo is permanent, but quite small, so they have lots of classes, kids, beginners, black belts, are all separated out, so I am in the coloured belt adults class. It's good, but very Italian and I don't have many clues about what is going on. And people just fugger off after, which is fine at the minute. I shall continue. Other than that I have had no exercise since I've been here, not good.