Cine schimbă becurile în cartierul Coppedè?

Cine schimbă becurile lampadarului, de exemplu?

În imagine, intrarea în cartierul roman Coppedè.

Nu e chiar un cartier, mai degrabă  o grupare de peste 40 de clădiri, proiectate  de arhitectul Gino Coppedè cu imediat un secol în urmă.

Benefits of living in Rome

My rusty English comes back in Rome! Spring has also come while the winds seem to have vanished.

A Google search brought a reader from Africa who really wants to know what were the benefits of living in Rome.

Let me tell you:

Food. Fresh food (people here have refrigerators but no other food storage space in their homes). From vegetables to fish, one could simply shop everyday for the dinner ingredients. Today we'll have broccoli, for example!

Then living in a open-air museum is another blessing. iPhone apps already help tourists understand where they are and what happened there years, centuries, millenniums ago. There are all kind of tours, exhibitions happenings. Google is generous with information on that, just search!

Climate. Though I shouldn't mention this after the snow that paralysed the city in February, temperatures here are friendly to Rome's inhabitants. (the minus being house heating is not a plus here and icy nights could be unpleasant just because people here do not agree it can be really cold inside. On the other hand, looking around in department stores one realises pyjamas are warmer here (I even saw woollen pyjamas. So they do know, just pretend Roman homes are warm)

Art. Art is everywhere and one only has to open the eyes.

Water. Tap water is very good, don't be afraid to drink it. Then all the fountains down town are the place all thirsty tourists should spot. Free fresh water.

Please let me know if you want a list of disadvantages of living in Rome.

back to Rome

Here I am , three years after, back in Rome.

Lovely warm autumn with very few clouds and a special treat at our arrival: 27 Celsius degrees at 7 PM. A shock, even if we were back from Mexico City, where winter or hot summer never comes.

A lot of exhibitions advertised on the streets and buses: Mondrian at the Vittoriano, Filippo Lippi and Boticelli or Georgia O' Keefe? Soviet art or street art? Plenty of time to discover it all.

In the meanwhile, I've discovered that at Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia, the other weekend, there will be Mahler and his Symphony of a Thousand. I shall be there.

I won't be talking about politics, it is really complicated to me to readapt to Europe and its struggles. There will be a way, I am sure.

due to the flu, i am blogging only in Romanian, here. *(why would that be a reasonable reason?)

i can have what i want here

extrapolation we organized a party last night. the posh kind. a reception, come on!

police car outside, called by ourselves, doorman tipped to be at the entrance until everybody leaves etc.

The first guests arrive in time, they are not Mexicans, what did you think? 

Me, near the door, busy with the flowers I got, somebody rings, I open, the posh lady that comes in ignores me (yes, normally the muchacha opens the door, why a muchacha will wear an expensive black dress, jewels and high heels i don't know) goes right where the people are, talks with them for some minutes, I imagine she is related to one of them, she then turns around and leaves. I don't remember who opened her door, the muchacha inside me didn't do it.

She was going at the Alliance francaise, one block away, and she ended near Allianz Fondika. I blame the taxi driver. And the policemen. And the doorman. Come one, how could she pass all those filters just because she was elegant? Nobody cared where she was going to! 

I intend to become a party breaker. And to go to all kind of posh dinners, just because I will dress the way I will dress.

PS: it would have been so cool if the lady realised she wasn't at the right party only after midnight!

Monica in the Silver City

As we had a loooong weekend in Mexico (it's the Benito Juarez day on the 21st of march and for some years every monday before is a day off, as many other Mondays, in fact)we got out of the city. As you go out of this big tortilla city for other reasons but sightseing: one of them, and an important one,  BREATHING (pollution and high altitude!).

Compasses, friends' suggestion, what we read in books, guides and magazines made us say Taxco and Taxco it was!The silver city.

It's up in the mountains, near the silver mines, and it has no more than 150 thousand inhabitants. And it's really cute!

We were lucky enough to be able to go there on the highway (still horrified with the roads we saw in our way to the monarch butterfly mountains)

So, what's going on in Taxco and who is there to testify?

Thousand of tourists who come to buy silver jewellery or oth

er souvenirs (it's not a cheaper one, but at least it's 925 or even 950 type silver), or  to linger in the main square (Zocalo, as in all Mexican villages or cities), or to eat in the few places that the guides recommend, to listen to some music, on Sunday, or to swallow what the buses', taxis' and dozens of cars' exhaustion pipes produce  as there are people who seemd to have been born in the car, if they cannot climb the city hill by themselves.

There are also museums in Taxco.

I was really sad when I realised the Humboldt House was closed, there was a witch stuff exhibition there that I missed (after the Cuernavaca one featuring torture instruments used by the Inquisition). But I visited the Silvery Museum and I found out that indigens used to work metals way before the Conquista, as precolumbians used silver for religious purposes and not only. 

And yes, I came back with a wonderful pair of earrings.

___________

PS> 10X for the Spanish to English translation down here!

help me understand mexicans

Here I was, this morning, at the Club where we go, waiting for the Aquqgym teacher to arrive. Like the past Friday, she didn't show up neither at 11 when the program say we should all begin move our bones deep into water, nor at 11.40 when I realise the all the classes began until now (what if the sun burns harder?)

Here she came at sharp 12, telling me the class will not begin because, please sit down- I don't want my readers to faint- in 15 minutes they will charge her more for the parking. I was this close to tell her: here are 15 pesos for that damn hour, but I couldn't move, speak, think farther. Here it is anot so cheap club, here is a coach paid to hold classes every day, here she comes telling me I don't know what Mister Vasconcelos talked to her for more than half an hour, and then the parking bomb.