Datum point lacking

I follow many blogs and most of them are written by people who live abroad, for example some in Dublin others in Sweden.
By reading them I learn their life story as immigrants, there is something that hurts them, they are lacking a steady friendship and in a few months they pass from one friend to another without making a long and stable friendship grow.
Probably it is due to the fact that they have lots of friends who are immigrants just like them and sooner or later they go back to their native country.
I think it's truly tough (and demeaning) to live this way. it seems like living without a datum point, without a friend with whom you hope to spend a big slice of your life along.
To integrate ourselves into another society which may be rather different from ours, isn't an easy task at all.

Sometimes you have to struggle to make people appreciate your origins, and you can live for a long time with the reasonable uncertainty of not being a part of them and maybe after a very long time you will be able to say I have a trusted friend; you're close to them.
There is a fact that surprise me, I heard someone say when you're in the United Kingdom it's quite simple to get in touch with the British for a night in front of a sparkling pint.
It takes just the night but the day after, the same people with whom you had sung and sat shoulder to shoulder, don't recognize you or say hello to you... it's unbearable !

Thanks to Zsofia and Nadia for correcting me

What do you know about Italy and Italians?

I' m wondering for what reasons or things, we are known in the world.
I have tried to find some answers to this question and most of them are platitudes like:

• the good food and wine. Italian cuisine is really healthy and with a large variety of tastes. Recent studies have stated that the Italian cuisine is a cooking model to copy.
  
• Countryside and seaside (most foreigners seem to know only Tuscany, Sicily and Amalfi),
  
• Art History (Florence, Rome, Venice, ...)
• Berlusconi who is the richest man in Italy and at the same time he has been our prime minister.
  
• Most of us are not good at speaking in English at all (included me).
• Fashion
  

Now I'm curious, do you identify the Italians with other symbols ?

Language exachange from New York Times

While I was reading the New York Times, I come across the following article:
Learning from Native Speaker without leaving home, where there are suggested some communities for language exchange like Live Mocha.
I haven' tried it yet, but if you have some experiences tell me your impressions.

My crafts

When I was a teenager, I used to work during the summer break.

I worked in different fields and one of these was old wood furniture restoration, I discovered this job by chance and it was very good for me because the laboratory where I worked is near my house, thus I didn't have to get up early :-D

The first impact wasn't really appealing but day by day I started to fall in love with this job and getting in touch with my boss who has become a friend of mine.

The smell, colours and veins of wood are fantastic and I had never imagined how tricky to restore an ancient furniture is, (sometimes you have to start from scratch !), I learnt many wise techniques from shaping wood to painting it.
Every wood has its own brightness, smell and "way of furnishing", a wood can make a dark room shiny, can fill an empty space with harmony.
During those days I developed the passion of creating something with the waste wood (leftovers) before they had thrown away, I wanted to give them a new shape, arrange something; I can't accept the idea of wasting wood for a personal purpose.
I built some items: a bass getting it directly from a raw olive branch, a little bear which embraces a heart, other subjects that I gave away, an old style airplane and two butterflies, these last objects are the only ones that I currently own.

The Airplane, in the pictures, was built with different kinds of wood for example the wheels come from a dismissed broomstick, the body is made of fir.
I left it as it appears without painting, I like seeing the veins of wood and its real colours, paint it, from my personal point of view, is like to overwhelm the wood.



The other pictures show a couple of butterflies, one of them I gave to my sister. Their wings are made mostly with oak stripes and their body have been built with olive wood pieces remaining after the airplane was made.

Thanks to Zsofia for her corrections

Something to teach

After Capello, who is currently manager of England football team, another national team, Republic of Ireland, has decided to leave its faith in care of an Italian manager, Trapattoni.
Trapattoni and Capello are both among the most representative Italian managers, two men with a high experience and a great career of outstanding results, they have won in Italy as either player or manger and abroad they have led great club towards challenging goals with the determination that they bring into their job every day.

Why did English and Irish chose them?
For their unquestionable technical skills, of course, but in my humble opinion because they are able to do something that is more than teaching game plans, they can spur players to reach ambitious goals, make they believe in themselves and in their capabilities, at the same time Capello and Trapattoni have always faced tricky situations face to face by making facts not fictions.

On BBC web site there is an article entitled Italy's football factory from which I extracted the following lines:
...Capello was extremely successful as a club manager in Italy, winning championships with AC Milan, Juventus, Roma and in Spain with Real Madrid.
Where does that winning formula come from? Perhaps from the Italian football academy at Coverciano, near Florence, where Fabio Capello began his career...
(also Trapattoni started his career as manager from Coverciano)
Going on listening the Christian Fraser's report, he says that Italian mangers study football at Coverciano as a science and the English need an academy like Coverciano to improve themselves and probably they will copy Covericano's teaching model for football managers, but they can't copy the mentality, the enthusiastic spirit that some Italians just like Capello, Trapattoni, Lippi and so on bring with themselves and this is something to be proud of because if we, Italians I mean, want to do something we can, we aren't only the pizza people.