tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-85367795033473215232024-03-13T12:47:58.910+01:00A peculiar ErasmusPaolo G. Giarrusso's travel blogAnonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04485097839438234853noreply@blogger.comBlogger10125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8536779503347321523.post-7214854109296848472010-06-09T18:55:00.004+02:002010-06-09T21:48:31.761+02:00Settling down<blockquote></blockquote>OK, I wrote about all kinds of different experiences here, but I've not answered the very basic questions that everybody is asking me. And now it's time to do so, after I had some time to settle down a bit. What am I doing here now?<div><blockquote></blockquote><ul><li>My research group is just great. People publishing <i><a href="http://www.ssc.unict.it/fibanno/2010/05/30/settorialita/#comments">relevant</a></i> stuff on top-venue conferences. And right now I'm exploring new knowledge directions. Our group consists of one full professor, <a href="http://www.informatik.uni-marburg.de/~kos/">Klaus Ostermann</a>, a few PhD students, and a couple more to come. We're in direct contact with him, and he's quite available. This allows us to grow and learn from him directly, unlike in huge universities where big names are hidden behind many levels of researchers.</li><li>I'm almost done dealing with bureaucracy. I recently got my contract from the university, and I have a bank account, residence certificate, immigration permit, and so on. But it was a long and painful fight. Phewww!</li><li>The place is just wonderful. Scientific faculties, like in Catania, lie uphill among trees, but the city is still quite far away. While I live quite next to the center, and to shops.</li><li>Home: I have a small room in a student dorm run by a local Evangelic church. Once upon a time, priests used to live here, but this is no more the case at all. Except for a few postcards about religions hanging on the walls, this is just a student dorm, and a nice one.</li><li>People in my student dorm are very nice and quite friendly, even if they are more friendly in German, for obvious reasons.</li><li>Food: Italian food pops out from everywhere. You can buy real Italian ingredients in a supermarket, or maybe-Italian prepared food somewhere. Especially they like Espresso and Cappuccino. Many of them crave for a really good one, and have to accept the inability to find any (say in my department). Their passion for Espresso seems like the passion for what you don't have (like penis envy in Freudian psychoanalysis). But you also find gorgonzola, ricotta, mascarpone, parmigiano, Nutella. So, cooking carbonara-way pasta, or tomatosauce, meatballs, or even risotto, is probably not a problem. I'm too lazy for now to try a ricotta cake or pizza ^_^. But I'm almost always cooking, when I eat at home.</li><li>Adult people sometimes are not so nice. I hate the guy who sold me my phone card. Shop owners in Catania are more respectful. But that's the exception.</li><li>My German is not good enough yet, but it's improving. I've been watching German TV. I even have a monolingual dictionary (a kind present of a leaving student of my dorm), and at some point soon I'll start to use it. Even my social life (beyond university) is starting to get back to a good level.</li><li>I enjoy shopping. Jesus, I do. OK, I'm cheating: I've never bought clothes here yet, and what I enjoy is finally finding something I've been looking for: cinnamom, <i>cannella</i> in Italian, was a bit hard to find. Or good olive oil. Or a hairdryer. Or a frying pan!<br />I know that this might sound stupid and of little value when you read it, but find something like this opens new possibilities in your daily life. You're conquering a small piece of your life.</li><li>I finally have Internet home. The painful days of using Internet just at the university (and running for the last bus) or at the public library have ended.</li><li>I'm reading wonderful books. But I'll talk about them elsewhere.</li></ul><div>And for the future? It'll be an almost-never-ending pleasuring fight, with daily life and with my career, but I'm here ready to face it!</div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04485097839438234853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8536779503347321523.post-64774053775750806382010-06-09T18:35:00.001+02:002010-06-09T18:36:36.212+02:00How to dress in public parksToday, while walking in the city park along the Lahn river, we saw a naked guy, front down, taking sun. Not even a swimsuit! Without any policemen hurrying to catch him, but it didn't seem it was so normal, either! Did you ever see something like that in Italy? I mean, outside of Indian reservation-like special places for nudists??Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04485097839438234853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8536779503347321523.post-52607642884117756582010-06-09T18:29:00.002+02:002010-06-09T18:35:30.250+02:00Finding German Germans<div>In the end, I found some more stereotypical Germans. But hey, they're not considered normal!</div><div><br /></div><div>It was in the immigration office. When the officer, whom we'll call Mrs. Whoknows, asked my passport, she made me almost feel guilty, even if I had one! She behaved like an army general. The words she said were not that bad - it was just the tone! And my Chinese friend tell me she's the kindest in that office.</div><div>Then, there was the office for public health insurance, and that was finally what I expected. Hey, they did care about my situation, phoned other office, and provided a perfectly working solution. OK, they didn't speak a lot of English, but enough to get the job done. But it seems that I'll find this kind of people just in offices :-|.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04485097839438234853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8536779503347321523.post-21161721669543982792010-06-09T04:08:00.006+02:002010-06-09T21:08:08.452+02:00Looking for German Germans<div>You know what one expects from Germans. Precise people, very careful to detail, everybody arriving on time... Let's call it the Prussian German stereotype, because that is its historical root (as Germans tell me). Well, it turns out that:</div><div><ul><li>Here this is not so true. Offices are often not so efficient, people cross the road (by foot) without craving for a green light first (no cars is often enough), and so on. Danish people were more in love with green lights, but sometimes it looked like they needed help to cross with a red light. "Help" like seeing me crossing first (I'm not so sure, but I've seen it happening enough times to remember it). I've even been cheated, at least in part, by a mobile cards shop owner here. And when I went complaining, he was almost making fun of me, just because I expected what he told me to be true!</li><li>Possibly, who told this was just looking at German Swisses. They are Prussian still nowadays. And IMHO that's why they don't like immigrants. When you sell newspapers by giving the material possibility to take the newspaper, pay it, or do both things, if you want (of course it's illegal to do otherwise, but the machine doesn't prevent you from doing that), you don't want foreign people to come and maybe steal something. But Swiss people are also famous for having invented just chocolate and cuckoo clocks, so there must be something wrong there, and I have an educated guess. But more about this later.</li><li>For sure, Germany has a North/South difference like the one in Italy. And for the place I live... it depends. The only sure thing is that Bavaria/Bavaria, with its Oktoberfest, is in Southern Germany, and this helps explain why it's so different from the Prussian German stereotype. But some people would call also this Land as Southern Germany.</li></ul><div>But I know "real German" Germans, they're just not here. They're actually the reason why I stopped hating stereotypes, while still recognizing that they are as misleading as any average. Once again, mathematics(the concept of average) is too simple to describe reality well (OK, an average has some value, but as a De Crescenzo character says, <i>if your body is half in a freezer and half in an oven, you're statistically great</i>). The difference here is that even people who hate maths tend to simplify too much the reality of life.</div></div><div>Another difference is that culture stereotypes are always limited by their very nature of judgement by a culture about another. And anthropology shows us that that becomes plain wrong, as soon as judgements are involved. More about this (hopefully) later.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04485097839438234853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8536779503347321523.post-70394639158152684432010-06-06T20:02:00.004+02:002010-06-06T23:18:03.424+02:00How to make health insurance unfair. Or the need of group therapy for self respect of Italians<div>Maybe you think that the place where things don't work is Italy, and just Italy. It's not true!</div><div><br /></div><div>A disclaimer: I live in Hessen, and I don't know how much of this applies to the rest of Germany.</div><div><br /></div><div>Here, if you are too rich, you can't be insured by the state (actually, by any public health insurance company. There are more ones). It makes sense that you pay it for yourself. But... hey, even if you're not so rich, you pay something to the state for it. If you are very poor, obviously, you pay very little (or nothing). If you are middle-class, you pay also for the poor people (and this already doesn't make sense - the money for the poor people should come from taxes paid by everybody). If you are very rich, then you go to a separate system, and there you pay just for yourself. Actually, it turns out that rich people are less often ill, since they have more comfortable lives (obviously, on average). So they pay less. While middle class people have to pay a lot because they pay for poor people. OK, that's fucked up!</div><div><br /></div><div>Actually, this part is worse than in Italy. Sometimes, when I'm in other country, I realize that while the Italian state does work worse than other states, we sometimes tend to exaggerate the perception of this, and we, the Italians, feel so bad about it.</div><div>It's like when you need <i>group therapy</i>: you think your situation is very bad and unique, but knowing other people with a similar problem allows you to see that after all, you're not alone. That's why the community of the Italian people, as a whole, need group therapy. IMHO. Well, if you can talk about the community of the Italian people... we don't really want, quite often, to be a community.</div><div><br /></div><div>Note: the first part of the analysis (on German health system) is not mine, I'm republishing it for the benefit of the public. And it was explained me by German people, so I guess it's trustworthy enough.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04485097839438234853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8536779503347321523.post-49526897577564895732010-06-04T16:20:00.004+02:002010-06-04T17:48:59.134+02:00Trust in supermarkets<div>Why do cashiers check if there is something under my bags or my backpack, and do not check what I have inside of it? It happened three times now, and once there was even tomato sauce (from another supermarket) visible inside my backpack!</div><div>I understand that probably they can't ask to look inside your backpack. But then it doesn't make sense to look outside of it! Do I look <i>so</i> stupid?</div><div>And it would be OK to seal backpacks, like in big Italian supermarkets. <i>Then</i> it would make sense to look outside.</div><div>Whatever. It's just weird. From my point of view, they're just literally crazy. And the idea that craziness is relative from the point of view is interesting. If a person made this in Italy, he'd be put in a psychiatric hospital. OK, not really, but at least would be regarded as quite weird. Here it's normal. And you can find examples of cultural differences which would make somebody simply crazy. Say, an Italian working as much as a Japanese wouldn't be that good.</div><div><br /></div><div>Part of the book I just read (<i>Lila</i>, from Robert Pirsig, the author of <i>Zen and the Art of Motorcycle maintenance</i>) is exactly about this, and it's not just the opinion of the author, which in some cases can be quite unconventional; this part is much more widely known and accepted. Anyway, I am going to talk about <i>Lila</i> another time.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04485097839438234853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8536779503347321523.post-60524733014773893312010-06-03T15:45:00.000+02:002010-06-03T15:46:09.601+02:00A brief FAQ about mafia<div>OK, I come from Sicily. And since I've been warned that everybody here has watched Der Pater (The Godfather, Il padrino), I almost always mention it when introducing myself, <i>after</i> mentioning the Aetna, to prevent questions. And I've found just a few people who haven't watched it. Including myself (but that'll be fixed soon).</div><div>So, I've decided to add a brief (not so serious) FAQ:</div><div> Q: Oh, you're from Sicily! Are you from mafia? Do you have acquaintances with mafia? Know anybody from it?</div><div> A: NO!*</div><div> Q: Does mafia exist? Do you notice?</div><div> A: I know it's there, but in my daily life in Catania I never see it. (Excluding parking men, but hey, they're not mafia men themselves actually).</div><div> Q: How do you recognize a mafia man?</div><div> A: I guess they have a coppola hat, walk with a "lupara" rifle, and go kissing their mortal enemies. No, not really. Mafia is made of stealth criminals - and even when everybody knows that somebody is from mafia, nobody can prove it.</div><div> (When I was asked this question, it didn't make sense to me at all. The first part of the answer came after, when I remembered that, well, in movies mafia men have a specific style).</div><div> </div><div>* (OK, people didn't ask me this, I was just joking here).</div><div><br /></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04485097839438234853noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8536779503347321523.post-47533527187856729432010-05-21T17:44:00.006+02:002010-05-21T19:25:44.163+02:00<div>While I think to something more interesting to write, I'll deal with something which is just technically astonishing. But it's also an example of the infrastructure difference that prompted me to move here. So one could probably invent a philosophical meaning for this post. Like "the Author is trying to suppress his homesickness with the reasons for which he moved to a place with better infrastructure". Well, I didn't move just for what is discussed below, but hey, it's a nice bonus.</div><div></div><br /><div>OK, in practice: here's what I got today on my console:</div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">$ ping www.google.com</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">PING www.l.google.com (72.14.221.104) 56(84) bytes of data.</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">64 bytes from fg-in-f104.1e100.net (72.14.221.104): icmp_seq=1 ttl=54 time=3.46 ms</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">64 bytes from fg-in-f104.1e100.net (72.14.221.104): icmp_seq=2 ttl=54 time=3.64 ms</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">[...]</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">^C</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">--- www.l.google.com ping statistics ---</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4006ms</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 3.290/3.486/3.707/0.170 ms</span></div><div><br /></div><div>Noticed something? Like the fact that it's contacting in 3 milliseconds a Google server <a href="http://www.geoiptool.com/it/?IP=72.14.221.104">in the US</a> (click the link if you don't believe me)?</div><div><br /></div><div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">$ wget 'http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04/release/ubuntu-10.04-dvd-amd64.iso'</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">--2010-05-21 17:43:14-- http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/10.04/release/ubuntu-10.04-dvd-amd64.iso</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">Risoluzione di cdimage.ubuntu.com... 91.189.88.39</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">Connessione a cdimage.ubuntu.com|91.189.88.39|:80... connesso.</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">HTTP richiesta inviata, in attesa di risposta... 200 OK</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">Lunghezza: 4418144256 (4,1G) [application/x-iso9660-image]</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">Salvataggio in: "ubuntu-10.04-dvd-amd64.iso"</span></div><br /><div><span class="Apple-style-span" style="font-family:'courier new';">45% [=======================================================> ] 2.029.255.408 8,13M/s in 4m 52s</span></div><br /><div>Hey, it's downloading at 8 MB/s! It varied between 5 and 10MB/s... with this network, one can even conquer the world!</div></div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04485097839438234853noreply@blogger.com2tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8536779503347321523.post-2820387453655703922010-05-21T17:31:00.007+02:002010-05-21T18:16:18.696+02:00Let's try again...<div>Like who'll read this blog in the future, if any (since nobody read it), will notice, this blog experiment didn't really work out. I had many things I would have liked to post, but too little time for that.<br />However, let's try again... Now this blog will be a blog about my traveling experience in general. Maybe sometimes I'll also discuss my experience in Denmark... we'll see.</div><br /><div>So, welcome back to my renewed^H^H^Hnew* blog, now international!</div><br /><div>* Those ^H are called Backspaces by computer hackers, but simply revergination by everyday people :-D.</div>Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04485097839438234853noreply@blogger.com0tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-8536779503347321523.post-28506283230605505242008-10-20T06:05:00.001+02:002010-05-21T17:31:01.994+02:00Benvenuti!Finalmente, dopo più di 2 mesi, apro veramente questo blog sul mio Erasmus. Giuro! Finora non ne ho avuto il tempo, tanto questo Erasmus mi ha tenuto impegnato finora.<br /><br />Approfitto per ringraziare <a href="http://menoventitre.blogspot.com/">l'ispiratore di questo blog</a>, mio collega che conosco da lunga data.<br /><br />Un po' particolare, questo Erasmus, lo è di sicuro, anche perché questa è una università tosta, e qua tutti (<b>volenti o nolenti</b>) siamo costretti a studiare, <i>oltre a fare party fino alle 4 del mattino, ed a bere quasi ogni sera...</i><br />Consegne settimanali, ahimè.<br />Ma voi mi conoscete, quindi (con Ignazio La Russa) diciamolo: <i>volenti</i>, per quanto mi riguarda.Anonymoushttp://www.blogger.com/profile/04485097839438234853noreply@blogger.com0