8/10

It's been a packed period lately. Around the "turn of the buoy" - half of my term here has well been overcome - there have been all sorts of happenings and curios things going on. Giuseppe, the flatmate from Sardinia who's been staying here for a month and a half, left some days ago, but we've definitely had a great time so far.

Work: pressed the clutch and set a higher gear, finally I'm completely busy. I had to build up my own position in the firm and invent my own schedule to complete some projects here and there. The warehouse has no more secrets for me!

Travelling: we drove to Key West, the "Southernmost place in the US", where Ernest Hemingway would live for some years in the 30s. It's more than 200 miles from Fort Lauderdale, all the way on those spectacular bridges linking the archipelago.

Food: yes, we've got plenty of Ben & Jerry's, including the classic tastes from the Chocolate Fudge Brownie to the Strawberry Cheesecake. Good memories of the months spent in the Netherlands.

We usually cook at home, after having shopped at Publix (grocery chain of SE United States), apart once when we popped at Whole Foods, the premium grocer's. We didn't care much but we paid some 70 dollars for a dinner based on salmon and tuna steaks; at least we enjoyed it -.-' otherwise I would have transformed the seafood dude into a nigiri sushi. However, my favourite dish to cook right now is sirloin steak, well seasoned with ginger and freshly ground black pepper, and of course juicily rare.

Talking 'bout sushi: I bought all the necessary items to make sushi. I set for myself the goal of transforming into a maki in my second life, but I'd prefer doing it with my own hands. Anyhow, cooking rice is a damn complicated process, and it will take some practice to reach the state-of-the-art in making good sushi rice - the start of good sushi dishes. I'll keep on trying next week...

Fun: we had this night out on a Limousine, with the chauffeur picking us up in Fort Lauderdale and dropping us off in Miami, where we went chilling out and clubbing in a couple of hot places. Then we hit other spots in the surroundings, such as clubs in Hollywood - halfway to Miami - and South Beach. We also touched three Hard Rock Cafés: Miami, Key West and Hollywood; plenty of memorabilia to gaze upon.

I'm waiting for the night of Sept. 5, when the Depeche Mode will rock the Bank Atlantic Center, in Sunrise - got a ticket for a the first ring, where apparently all the tickets had been sold out, but all sorts of hopes and prayers - and constant checks on the website - must have done the job.

Art District

Have you ever felt like wanting to spend your life with somebody you love? Even if you didn't, that's what inspired one of Tracey Emin's famous neon works, on exhibit at the Museum of Arts of Fort Lauderdale (MOAFL). Heavily influenced by the recent trends in fine arts and design launched by Miami's Art Basel showcase, and by the related flourishing of arts schools and districts, it was obviously a walk through a compendium of pieces of modern arts. A wing fully dedicated to William Glackens, Courbet-influenced painter from Philly, was the "element of unpredictability" in the middle of the visit.

It goes without saying that a part of the artworks, mostly paintings, put sex-related themes on show. Usually there is a sense of bare cruelty in this kind of representations, as if the artist himself had exacerbated the topic in the course of his life; maybe this was Emin's thought - take a past exhibition dedicated to sex, entitled Everyone I've Ever Slept With (1963-1995), she claimed the count was 102; probably that was when she showed the neon sculpture People like you need to fuck people like me.

Nowadays we are awash in artworks about sexual representation; I guess this is the result of centuries where the need of portraying erotism was inhibited by repression and censorship. Have we ended up amidst oversupply? Uncomfortably uninformed enough to give an answer, I can say there's a type of nudity for everyone. There's the hilarious representation of almost lesbian scenes in the women-populated paintings by Hilary Harkness, or the luscious and abundant breasts depicted by Lisa Yuskavage (said to have Vermeer's technical ability), or the same subject made cartoon-like by Tom Wesselmann. Someone went further and introduced intercourses in the game, with the greedy lovers of John Currin or the softly dissolved scenes pictured by Cecily Brown.

I spotted Currin at the MOMAK in Vienna, but now that I'm in the USA I fully understand the (simple) meaning of his portraits of fake women...

News from the World

Woah, another fortnight ebbed away. I won't deal with the third week, when I had a not-so-unusual tonsillitis -.- and the resulting weekend, which was also damn rainy and humid. Although the fourth week is going much better, moisture hasn't left the area - and it'll never do it until the season ending - and showed itself yesterday with an unpredictable shower. Of course, rain started in the middle of my journey home for the lunch break, as I was riding my Honda, resulting in a soaking Alfred who had to take a warm shower to avoid wasting one week of antibiotics.

The cool thing is that weather changes quickly, so that rain stopped quite early in the afternoon spurring me to go out for some shopping. Also, I had some more free time 'cause my working days are very short recently - not much stuff to do this week, I'm waiting for some items I ordered for the warehouse. Therefore I could go to the Galleria, a local shopping mall, to buy a pair of jeans at Banana Republic for some 85 $. The same amount I spent at Sports Authority to buy a pair of training shorts, a t-shirt and a sports bag (all Nike's). So I fired out some bucks out of my wallet, but I should be still below my monthly budget (I am entitled to a 500-dollar reimbursement). However, I plan to subscribe to a gym to get back in shape, so every argumentation miserably fails in front of the shopping spree.

Tomorrow it's time to go for a daily trip, destination Key West. The Key Islands are an archipelago coming in form of an arc-shaped ramification. Everything is linear and connected via a series of bridges jumping from one island to another, leading west to Key...West. This is the southernmost point of the United States. They told me there are weird signs such as "the southernmost trash bin of the US" and so on placed on all things. Americans...

Things at Navalimpianti USA are going on quite well. Apart from my assignment on inventory control, I started challenging my colleagues in the office and some Hispanic warehouse-guys at tabletennis (ping pong). I became an aficionado when my best friend was constantly beating me in London last summer. Then I "took lessons" from a Polish classmate in Rotterdam, a guy who used to play at some level, and we also subscribed for a tournament - where I got a sound thrashing by the rapid Asian players. Since then I took any occasion to practice and play. Now things in the warehouse got serious: we're playing for dinners.

Outside the company things seem to be also fine. To be honest you wouldn't spot as much "crisis" as they say. Florida was one of the hardest-hit States in the '29 Crisis (let's assume that it began here), but in this one it plays quite normally. California, on the contrary, is on the verge of a financial crisis, with Schwarzy fighting an over-50% deficit. Texas, instead, is faring much better and seems to be the next leading State of the Federation.

Oh, enjoy a shot from Fort Lauderdale Beach ;)


(Game: spot a quotation from the rock band The Queen in this post)

Fortnight n. 1

First two weeks have gone so far. I cannot feel whether it was yesterday or one month ago that I left Italy. Now I'm getting used to life in the United States, where I have the pleasure to reckon the presence of loads of Ben & Jerry's ice cream. If you have to try some real good stuff in your life, try Ben & Jerry's "Vermont's finest ice cream", with fancy product names such as Chunky Monkey, Cooke Dough, Strawberry Cheesecake and my favourite Chocolate Fudge Brownie. Urban legends want that the incredible flavour comes from the milk produced by the company's "Happy Cows".

The past week's other interesting things sum up to: my internship, my moped, the beach, the...hooters. My current job (for other 8 weeks) is at the US subsidiary of an Italian company that offers spare parts and maintenance for ships (cargos, cruise ships, yachts). So I landed in an office where doors are topped with writings like "When all else fails, try doing what the captain suggested", "Life Boats: Children and women first", "Surfin' USA". However the sea is distant at least 3 miles. Palm trees are not missing anyway. Anyway, I'm taking care of reorganizing the inventory, which translates into spending half-day in a freakin' hot messy warehouse and the rest in a damn cold air-conditioned office. I've been entitled to use a company-owned apartment and a scooter, a Honda Metropolitan 2008 that I now ride quite safely.

The apartment is quite large, every guest has an own room with a double bed, plus a common space with kitchen and living room. The house is quite recent and is organized on three levels. I still have to understand some things, for instance the way toilets flush, which caused some little clogging problems - courageously solved by using a specially-made toilet plunger to unclog it. Guys, this product is gold, write that down!

Last Sunday, and surely also this weekend, was beach-time. Beaches in this part of the US are quite curious: 60% of guys are lookalikes of Big Gym, while more or less the same percentage of women carry heavy fake breasts. This people's concern for appearance is very...concerning. Women are particularly subject to this: now, my sight usually concentrates on boobs (lol), but it seems that also quite a lot of noses (and booties, they say) undergo a nip'n'tuck process. You cannot become a waitress or serve in a bar if you don't have fake breasts, dear ladies. But this is a strange country. Breasts were in origin for baby's milk. Here it's not fashionable anymore to feed babies with own milk...well, welcome to America!

Intro

Things always happen so fast. The few times they happen slowly, however, you just don't consider them. I came back from 4 months in Rotterdam one month and half ago, and now I'm in Florida. In the middle there's been a painful haze in which any possible short-term life goal seemed unreachable. But surprises never come to an end - eventually I got an internship and swiftly packed again for a two-month American experience.

I'm not going to tell everything at once: there will be a short dose of stories every now and then. Also because I'm not the most reliable blogger on Earth, hence my narratives accrue and I tend to tell something that happened days or weeks before. But in the end it doesn't really matter. One week ago, after an endless trip, I landed in New York. Quite sleepless, I have to admit - staying overnight in Rome waiting for a flight at 9am was not the happiest moment of my life.

Things turned out to be decent when Giacomo picked me up at Grand Central and welcomed me in his apartment in the East Village. He got an internship too, some stuff in budget & control, downtown Manhattan. So we spent together a couple of days, 3 and 4 of July, when Macy's fireworks lit up NY's sky to celebrate the Independence Day. Notwithstanding the long hours of journey, I recklessly endangered my feet's state by wandering the city for two days. I was deadly tired, but it was worth the effort. We managed to sightsee properly and to take some pictures of the places to be.

On Sunday I left from La Guardia airport in the late morning and embarked on a cattle-cargo airplane bound to Fort Lauderdale, Florida. Three hours later, after having picked my luggage and having ascertained the Americans' tendence to pump up the air conditioner, I finally took my first breath of Southern air. The impact was terrific: humidity here is at tropical levels. Imagine Milan on a typical day in August: well, multiply that by two and you get an idea. I promptly understood why the team is called Miami Heat.

The day after I stepped into the premises of the firm I'll be working for during the summer. Cool office - more in terms of temperature than metaphoric - and damn hot warehouse, the place where I'll spend half of the time. But this is enough for a first post. Enjoy a photo of New York.