Always something to see in Milan

The Tommy Hilfiger pop-up house and all its preppy coolness opposite the Duomo.

The MACHINE must go on.

Despite my good intentions to post regularly and to keep this blog entertaining and as informative source of my well-being to the people back home, the usual thing which is called life happened. Romantic-visions-of-living-in-a-different-country aside, it still becomes your life at some point and then the usual things prevail. Responsibility, friendships and having to eat, sleep and wash your clothes every now and then exists whether you do it in English, Afrikaans or Italian. My life here is pretty full, so here is only a short update of my well-being in list format.

1.  I got a bicycle, its improving my faith in God, I have to pray often because Italians drive like assholes. I love it though; I get to school way faster. I haven’t fallen with it yet.  It has a bell and a basket and the breaks function properly. I love not having a car, I love being outside.

2.     It was my birthday in May, I am now 27, I have not yet grown up properly. The day itself was pretty eventless, but the day before I had a picnic and rode around on my bicycle wearing banana underpants on the outside.

3.     Yes, parents I do eat well, despite my laziness to cook, small budget and affinity to eat too much sugar, I manage to get all the food groups into my diet. I do not seem to have lost weight or gained too much either.

4.     I have become a coffee addict. Un cafe macchiato per favore!!!

5.     Exams is in three weeks. WHAT!! YES!!! And then I am sitting here writing a blog when I am supposed to read Deleuze.

6.     We are working on tons of projects at school. School itself is a godless learning MACHINE, but we are making it work for us.

7.     I got to redo a performance called “Wearable Chairs” by Gianni Pettena. Also got to meet him. We learn a shit load of the 60’s and 70’s and art.

8.      I am making art (or trying to). My room is a mess in the process. Also making a huge sculpture with Edith and Leah (pictures will be posted once it’s done).  Love working with them. We get each other’s humour. We laugh a lot. A LOT!!! Love them. Good friendships are founded on humour I think.

9.     We are organising an exhibition - check it here.  Working with 30 students, no joke. Makes me swear in all 3 languages I know. Also NABA doesn’t clean the spaces for us, so we were carrying heavy stuff and doing cleaning. My body is in pain today. On the upside of this, I got to see skinny Italian men, wearing skinny jeans carrying heavy things. The relationship between muscle, weight and body mass defied all scientific logic when you see a skinny slightly feminine boy carrying something which is twice his size (it’s the small things in life which delights me).

10.  Summer is here and it is hot. I get to wears skirts. Sun cream is really expensive here. I have gotten a tan (or at least for my white skin, something which resembles a slight colour). GELATO is fantastic, and I am addicted to cappucio freddo  - milk on ice topped with espresso.... ja ja

11.  Oh yeah, going to the VENICE BIENNALE ja ja ja!!

Ok, thats that. Oh, yes also my English grammar and spelling is deteriorating, and I have not time to edit things. I am dealing with it. 


I hope to update at some point with pictures and anecdotes. But right now I am off to school to hang up our exhibition.

A short break - Friendship and stroopwafels

I have had no time to write lately, also sometimes just not the inspirations and at most time just not the energy.  But it is Easter holiday now and I am writting from Amsterdam while stuffing my face with stroopwafels. It is my fourth visit to this city, and everytime I arrive I am happy to be here, I love this city.  People on bicycles (the air here is way cleaner then in Milan), a language where I recognise the words and well this city with its canals is just so picturesque.  But the best part of it is that I am vistiting my besty Lise who has been living here since 2008.

One often has very romantic ideas about travel, and in a lot of ways those ideas are true, but when one moves to a country for a longer period then a touristic visit one is also faced with the harsh realities of dislocation. It is not a temporal sense of dislocation that one enjoys and then returns home and put in a photoalbum to look back on. One is living alone far away from home, with people often being so different from you in culture, language and belief which hard as it forces you to confront you own ideas, beliefs, culture. While this is not a bad thing, the process in itself can be quite disruptive to the system, it is a series of breaking things down and building things up, finding an idendity in another space. One does not have the same luxury of quickly calling a friend who believes exactly the same as you to call when you are experiencing an exitstentialist crisis. It is a challenge one can not foresee or understand unless you have done the same.  And one that will not leave you unchanged.

By then one has this realisation that by the time you will return back home, that home will probably not feel that home anymore. One has this fear that when you get there you will be so different that one wouldn’t find your space there either.  One also has a fear to somehow betray yourself, and its a violent process of holding on to things and letting go of others.In this half way there space is a longing to just touch base somewhere.

 What amazing thing a good friend is. We have not seen each other in months, and in the time we have been changed.  We share a tiny mattress sleeping “kop voet” (the skill of sleeping with on head on the one side of the bed and the other on the other side) like one needs when one doesn’t have enough beds, something we learnt already in the early years of our friendship at University. One can be happy with so little. And now many years later, older, two very different people from our original wide eyed days, we can still find honesty, I can still feel like myself and I am able to piece together little pieces of myself, albeit a little rearanged. And we can still laugh at each other’s jokes; we still understand each other even though we are different. A good friend brings home, no matter where you are.