Tom Dice, Me and My Guitar

So maybe I should get a nine to five
But I don’t want to let it go, there’s so much more to life
Tom Dice, extract from Me and My Guitar

There was me, the New Zealander with dual citizenship feeling the Belgian part of my identity, watching Tom Dice, my favourite new singer, competing in Eurovision 2010. 

I ended up watching the show by accident ... only to find myself on the edge of my seat, as Tom slid up and down the placings from 1st to 6th. 

But I love this song ... the ultimate artist’s song surely.

Pearl S. Buck, Creative Minds

The truly creative mind in any field is no more than this: A human creature born abnormally, inhumanely sensitive. To them… a touch is a blow, a sound is a noise, a misfortune is a tragedy, a joy is an ecstasy, a friend is a lover, a lover is a god, and failure is death.

Add to this cruelly delicate organism the overpowering necessity to create, create, create — so that without the creating of music or poetry or books or buildings or something of meaning, their very breath is cut off…

They must create, must pour out creation. By some strange, unknown, inward urgency they are not really alive unless they are creating.
Pearl S. Buck

Remembering ...

I love the way we can bring the past alive in our present ... recalling the people we loved and lived with, the way that they made us feel. 

I find everyone is still there, as memories, whenever I look for them

7am here in Italy, a cup of coffee from my travel coffee-pot and a packet of Italian shortbread-like biscuits ...

Voila, I find memories of Nana and pre-breakfast coffee back home at her place, in Invercargill, New Zealand.  Us chatting as she sped-read through her daily Southland Times, checking the news.

If we could have imagined the future ... ‘Hey Nana, in 2010 I’m going to be sitting at Paola’s kitchen table, in a small and ancient city in Italy, windowsopen so I can hear the sounds of the city waking, drinking coffee, just like you and I are now.’

Nana, who never left New Zealand in all of her life.  I wonder if she dreamed of traveling.  We never talked of those things.

Or a conversation with Mum ... ‘So I moved to Istanbul in 2003.  You would have loved it!  The people are so friendly, the summers are warmer than they were in Mosgiel.  Come visit me?

Then Belgium from 2005,and mum would have flown in, creating a garden on that first massive terrace we had in Antwerp.  And she would have spent evenings out there, ignoring the mosquitoes, drinking white wine and watching as the sun slipped below the horizon. 

Genova!   I’m sure she would have refused to leave.  We would have laughed about me being my mother’s daughter perhaps, with a need for the sea and serious hills, and maybe we could have planned opening some kind of B&B here, with my daughter and her daughter, satisfying our oddly hospitable souls and the pleasure we find in knowing people.

And my lovely little sister, Sandra ... the one who has always been older and wiser, even if she was born after me.  We used to talk across the space between our single beds, back in those days when we shared a room.  If we had imagined my future life then we would have been guilty of inventing wild and untrue tales ... ones where Istanbul, Antwerp and Genova were flights of fanciful imaginations.  Impossible dreams.

She needs to come here now.  I need her in my life too.

But Genova ...!

Did you know that swallows fly up and down Via San Lorenzo, screeching like hysterically happy school kids, playing chase at an out-of-control birthday party.  They amuse me, those swallows, even as I realise I can't begin to capture their antics with my camera.

And do you know how it sounds to wake to a cafe directly below your bedroom window?  The clatter of cups and saucers, and the everyday Italian conversations that fly up and in through my window.  The one that is open behind the still-closed green shutters, just across from my bed.

Did you know that this woman, a few thousand miles from home, with what feels like so many past lives, so far from the people she first loved, finds this Ligiurian city an exquisitely beautiful place to remember and miss them?

Church bells ring in through the open window ... 8am.

Time to begin the new day but Sandra, come over one day soon.

Ciao from Genova.

Moving + long crazy days = Chianti

It seems possible that this bird, photographed in a lovely park on the side of a hill in Portofino, had just read my appointments for the week diary ... hence the startled look on her face.

You see, this morning began at the rental agency, where Gert and I signed for the quirky house.  The one we can begin the interior repaint as of Tuesday.  The road will be long but hopefully worth it.  Then Jessie and I spent the rest of the day preparing our current apartment for possible new renters - to be read as, Jessie and I spent almost all day cleaning, scrubbing and dusting things.

I have agreed to take on an English student for a month, he arrived today and we mapped out how his sessions would go over the next 4 weeks.  He's the loveliest Turkish guy.

I checked in with the NGO, worked online for them and made plans to go in on Tuesday ... not Monday because I have an English lesson and then later, I’m being interviewed by a journalist.

Wednesday Diede and his family will call in on their way home from France. 

Thursday and Friday might be taken up by work in Brussels, as the NGO is moving office in the weeks ahead too.

So it seems wise, and not an altogether wicked idea, to invest in some chianti and at the end of each of the long days I see ahead of me, to plan on sitting back with a glass of red wine and working on this website of mine.  Jessie and I have some delicious surprises in store for readers in the weeks and months ahead.

Tot straks from Belgie.

Colin Monteath, Photographer, Writer, Explorer

Chance encounters change lives. Close friends, passing aquaintances and even characters who emerge from old books often leave footprints across my heart. By opening mysterious doors, the influence of others has inadvertently altered the direction of my life.
Colin Monteath,  from Under A Sheltering Sky

Bar Boomerang, Genova

One of my favourite places, here in the city of Genova, is Bar Boomerang. 

Initially it was the name that I noticed.  Then the fantastic, never-tasted-better cappuccino drew me back again and again.  On this, my second visit to the city, I discovered that their aperitivo is the nicest aperitivo I’ve had so far.

The staff are friendly, clients are important to them and their passion for the work comes through in all that they do.  If you are in Genova, I recommend you find your way to this cafe and decide for yourself.

In a small interview with Simona, the patient barista (patient in working with my New Zealand English), I asked a few questions about the cafe. 

She explained that the name had orginated from a visit that Marta, the owner, had made to Australia.  Marta and her husband enjoyed the trip so much that they named their Genovese cafe Bar Boomerang.  I need to explain that what we would call a cafe in New Zealand is a bar here in Italy, although alcohol is served so perhaps it becomes something of a hybrid.

Open five years, the bar is located on via Porta Soprana, 41-43,  not far from the ancient Genovese gate known as Porta Soprana. The gate, built in 1155, was originally intended as a defense rampart, with access for commercial traffic arriving via the interior, and acted as a barrier to would-be conquerors like Barbarossa and others.  Today it stands permanently open, welcoming foreign creatures like me inside this ancient part of the city.

As a tourist, a sometimes shy tourist without l’taliano, I was a little intimidated about just how to order my coffee. Of course, it’s quite simple. You wander into the cafe, order your coffee, select something to eat if needed and take it yourself.  In most bars, you can either pay a little extra and take a seat or stand at the bar and drink without sitting.

You pay as you leave.

At Bar Boomerang, their work is a passion and I’m sure that is what makes everything taste so good.  Simona took me through the four steps required to make good coffee.  Obviously you begin with good coffee, then you make sure your machines are clean.  The third step involves making a good press and the fourth, well that surprised me, it’s about noting the humidity and any changes in the humidity.  If it changes, the settings on the coffee machine need to change too.

The coffee is so very good.  It’s one of the things I missed for weeks after leaving last time and I expect it will be the same this time.

Most people know Italians take their coffee very seriously.  I asked Simona about the ‘rules’ and she explained that a typical Italian customer might have cappuccino or latte in the morning. Milk coffee is only for mornings and laughing she said, not before or after lunch or dinner.  This is more of a tourist thing or maybe in winter, on a really cold day.  Expresso is for all the time, after lunch or dinner particularly, as its role is to aid in digestion.  You could typically follow the expresso with a liquer of some kind like limoncello, grappa or jagermeister.

I feel more relaxed when I wander into the bars here now, still imperfect and prone to crave cappuccino at inappropriate times but less worried.

Bar Boomerang is open from 7am until 9pm,  6 days a week – closed Sunday.  They also serve lunches but that’s another post over on the blog.