Welcome to Bologna

There is no place like home, but there are some places that remind you of home and living there is easy and pleasant and makes you feel exactly like home, which might be strange if you have got used to not living at home. Confusing?

This is how confused I felt my first days in Bologna. It's Italy, Mediterranean, just five steps away from Greece, sounds and smells like home. So here I am, back where people are on the streets and laugh and shout and talk to you and joke around and make you feel totally relaxed and comfortable.But I was used to living in Bratislava, remember? Where it snowed non-stop, people were locked in their homes or half drunk in the bars and you hardly met someone outside (it was winter and cold, they had a point).

So my first days here, this mixture of familiarity and strangeness made me appreciate even more my new life: every single moment made me feel more and more that I'm back home -whether that was due to the people or the weather or the food- without losing nothing from the zest of the new. However, it was the people I met, who gave Bologna a place in my heart. They showed me around, lent me their homes, taught me the first words, helped me communicate and introduced me around. Bologna offered me the warmest welcome and will always remind me of the kindness of strangers and that we can still count on it.

(Ok, I am living here the last 4 months and I should have written this a long time ago, but better late than never.)

Mila's Daydreams

Aren't these photos beautiful? Honestly, it's been a long time since something impressed me that much. I suppose this is what can happen if you combine creativity, inspiration and some free time.

(For more info on Adele Enersen's -and Mila's- amazing work, go here)

Crows

by Nicoletta Ceccoli

Vita alla bolognese

What I like:

• Beautiful Bologna itself
• The ice cream
• The aperitivo
• Moscato and Limoncello
• The summer cinema in Piazza Maggiore
• People in the parks
  
• The cute bars
• Lying on the grass at the riverbank

What I don't like:

• Extremely "al dente" pasta
  
• Double consonants (+ my inability to pronounce them)
• That coffee time lasts only 15 minutes

What I did:

• Managed to learn Italian
• Read Gianni Rodari in original version
• Went to Perugia
• Changed my haircut
• Discovered my cooking talent
• Salsaed and tangoed and poledanced
• Fell in love

How I became a smoker

I smoke since I was 19, which is funny as, until 17, I was a fierce anti-smoker. I thought that smoking is the stupidest thing ever and I looked snobbishly at my classmates who couldn't find a more original way of proving that they have grown up. How I softened, I have no idea. All I know is that, in a period of two years, my random, once-in-a-while cigarette of 17 turned into regular, I-buy-my-own-packet smoking.

My parents did not smoke. My mother had never started, my father used to but had quit when I was 4. That was also the age I learnt the harmful effects of tobacco. Which, apart from making me a very informed child, deprives me from using the excuse of ignorance.

I do not even remember how I started my occasional smoking. I do remember my first cigarette though. I was 14 and, dead curious to try its taste, I asked a cigarette from my mother, who took one from my aunt and gave it to me. Which, contrary to what one might think, was a wise move: my curiosity vanished without having to either buy cigarettes myself (=19 more waiting to be smoked) or ask one from the group who smoked next to the toilets during the breaks, thus revealing myself as potentially one of them, thus welcome member in their foggy group (=guaranteed cigarettes for the rest of the year).

I also remember when I consciously decided to buy my first packet. It was during a period of stress, sadness and desperation (in different words, after a break-up) and it just felt right. I suppose I had underestimated the power of the image: in all the movies and TV shows I had seen till then, that was where the distressed protagonist would find comfort eventually: alone, in the dark, with the red flame lighting their face as they inhaled deeply. Plus, two years of only occasional smoking had proved me that I can control it.

To be 100% sure, a few months after buying my first packet, I succesfully quit for a period. Pleased and persuaded, I restarted, then requit and then restarted and then requit, until, one beautiful day, I decided to stop playing and quit once and for all; I managed to last only a few days.

Since then, my original "occasional smoker" has been replaced by an "occasional non-smoker" - I count about five unsuccesful attempts to quit smoking, after each of which my parents desperately move their heads and say "we had told you so". Me, I just roll snobbishly my eyes: I am never, ever, gonna admit to them that, yes, they were right on the first place.