CURRENT MISSION

Learning Mandarin Chinese

ABOUT ME

News junkie, passionate about politics, philosophy, books, printed press, people and backpacking. Curious as a monkey, rookie lindy hopper, vynil collector.

还会说老外的汉语

“I am a good Hegelian. If you have a good theory, forget about the reality." So what's your theory?

Interests

I love reading tons of books, watching long movies in unintelligible languages (with subs!) and I always try to understand reality. I'm interested in everything, very curious about new experiences and trying to have the most fun from each and every moment. I cannot stand people who never smile,narrow minds, routine and banality.

• books
• swing dancing
• politics
• news
• movies
• reading
• history
• languages
• philosophy
• chinese
• china
• lindy hop
• balboa

Music, Movies, and Books

Books: In defense of lost causes, The kindly ones, The Great War for Civilisation: The Conquest of the Middle East,Life and Fate, Il Gattopardo, Limonov, The Great Game, The Great Gatsby, The case of exploding mangoes

Movies: Into the wild, Dogville, Reds, Il divo, The pervert's guide to cinema, Lust caution, The house of the flying daggers, A woman a gun and a noodle shop

Music: Two Door Cinema Club, Beirut, Arcade Fire, Baustelle, Elvis Presley, Bruce Springsteen, Ewert and the two dragons, The Killers, U2, Coldplay, Franz Ferdinand, Gogol Bordello, 胖虎, Radical Face, Rein, Francesco Guccini, Cold War Kids

One Amazing Thing I’ve Done

My favourites:
- Getting lost alone in the hills around Petra and being brought back hours later by a nomad met by chance;
- Dancing a never ending night of syrtaki with local old people in the main square of a small village in Greece;
- Drinking homemade alcohol on a patio with fishermen and their kids on the Mekong delta;
- Singing traditional Chinese songs in a carriage full of students at 4 am during a 14 hour-long hard-seat train trip to Xian;
- Riding a motorbike with a local Nepali in the outskirts of Patan to go to dinner at a 2-table restaurant where everyone was eating with the same spoon and newspapers were used as napkins;
- Being invited to have some tea in a house in Jordan with no chance of communication with locals and having an English speaker appositely invited from a nearby village;
- Getting invited on stage of a local neighborhood festival in Surabaya to greet the audience and show some traditional "italian" dance;
- Joining local people camping in Wadi Ad-Disah for a ride on their 4x4 and for lunch, while learning to eat rise with the right hand among tons of laughs;
- Having tea and food with the most welcoming and cheerful host family in Rijal Alma, with the widowed grandpa recording a love message for my widowed grandma in Italy while we were getting our personal knives ready for an afternoon full of adventures and "tigers";
- Sleeping in a cave in Taman Negara with one billion bats observing me from the ceiling and leeches lurking around in the mud out in the wild.

Countries I’ve Visited

Armenia, Austria, Azerbaijan, Belgium, Bolivia, Chile, China, Croatia, Cuba, Czech Republic, Denmark, Ecuador, Egypt, France, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Indonesia, Ireland, Jordan, Lithuania, Nepal, Netherlands, Peru, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, United Kingdom, United States, Uzbekistan, Viet Nam

Countries I’ve Lived In

China, Italy, Netherlands