This weekend I’ve finally started my personal tour of the Netherlands, all around the major cities I still have to visit in this country. Maastricht was the first destination, and I’ve chosen it because it’s basically a very cosmopolitan old city bordering with Belgium and Germany; unfortunately, the trip lasted 5 hours and 30 minutes from Groningen due to a number of issues with the Dutch railway system, not to mention about the return journey that made me experience an additional hour of delay and seven different trains to take – and a bus too. But I can say it was worthwhile, because it is actually a very characteristic and pleasant town to visit, and also kind of different with respect to the rest of the Netherlands.

Pictures of Maastricht I made are available at my Flickr profile. The next destination is yet to be chosen (it might be either Rotterdam or Nijmegen, but we’ll see anyway), in any case it won’t happen before next February. Groeten uit Nederland!

My Dutch path can be basically defined as a continuous attempt to choose the next move and understand what I really want to have in my next future.

And, since my ideas are still very unclear, I still keep on repeatedly living weeks all the same way, waiting for something to happen. And letting myself being driven by events instead of holding the steering wheel myself and choosing my own path. It is slowly getting evident I am getting inured to life (and rain) in Groningen, and this will probably lead me to some kind of choice in the future. Well, I already knew I am completely unfit for “regular living”, with my story as a clear proof of it, so it’s just something unsurprising.

And anyway there’s still a long time coming, so for now I can just sit down and wait for the events…

In your opinion, does it make any sense to repeat over and over again that I don’t really know what I want to do with my life?

Well, probably it does not, but anyway that’s just the truth. And you know, I am a strange man. And, actually, the fact is that people are strange, as a musician called Jim Morrison used to sing forty years ago.

People are strange when you’re a stranger
Faces look ugly when you’re alone
Women seem wicked when you’re unwanted
Streets are uneven when you’re down
When you’re strange
Faces come out of the rain
When you’re strange
No one remembers your name
When you’re strange
When you’re strange.

It’s been a long time I did not write about politics, so here we are. On next Sunday, the Democratic Party (the biggest Italian opposition party) will hold a primary election to choose its leader; I have recently more and more critical of that party but it’s obvious to say that it still has a key role in the Italian left.

After a long personal meditation, this time I have decided to vote for the new leader, thus taking a different choice than two years ago, when I decided not to vote at all. The different factor that persuaded me to make this choice is the candidacy of a man with real innovative and fully European ideas, which I understand and admire as an Italian living abroad who has always been quite critical of how things work in his country: the candidate I am talking about is (of course) Ignazio Marino.

Through the Internet, I had the chance to get in touch with Marino’s wide platform for a modern Italy, and all I can say is that I just agree with them all. Then, he is a politician who does not belong to the old nomenclature, and a man who has lived abroad for a long time and got in touch with the ethical and social differences between Italy and the rest of the “rich” world. And, let me say this, is there a better choice than an internationally renowned surgeon if you want to remove an advanced cancer, as Berlusconi’s political system is, from Italy’s body? I think no.

About the other two candidates, well, they do not even deserve to be mentioned in depth: on one hand, outgoing leader Dario Franceschini, who can be compared to a beautifully-decorated empty box; on the other hand, Pierluigi Bersani, a.k.a. another representative of the old political class (as a man with almost 20 years of time in national politics without ever doing anything really notable), and another actual renewal opponent in perfect Italian style – not a case his main endorser is an obsolete, die-hard politician such as Massimo D’Alema.

I know it’s quite unlikely that Marino might actually win the leadership election, considering the way things work within a party who is losing more and more touch with the real world (that is why I think that Bersani will ultimately be the winner). Nevertheless, it’s a fact that we have to offer our small contribution in order to improve the current situation, especially if you can choose a leadership candidate with the guts and the right profile to be a valid European leader, and the chance to apply a modern platform of clear ideas with the potential to push our country forward.

so, now you might think: how could I cast my vote at the leadership if I live in the Netherlands? Well, strange but true, but there’s a Democratic Party poll station in Groningen too…

Psychedelic music at its best. Pink Floyd represent a probably unreachable top in the whole music history, and this is one more proof of that claim.

Let’s update this thing. I’ve spent the last two Saturdays out of Groningen (Leiden and Amsterdam, to be precise), which is definitely not bad, especially when it gets into a good chance to meet some good friends; and today I was at the 4 Mijl, a four mile (6.2 km) athletics race that actually involves the whole city of Groningen. Just to give you an example, you can see real athletes mixed with eclectic Dutch characters, such as “runners” dressed like gorillas with fake bananas in their hands, or even competitors dressed like businessmen with suit, necktie and briefcase. The Dutch craziness (a positive craziness, I mean) has no borders, actually.

The picture above was taken by me this afternoon as I was returning home. I took it since it reminded me of a good-old pacifist slogan in the Italian protests of 1968 such as put flowers on your cannons. Then, the choice of a flowering “cannon” very next to the central train station is symbolic as well, since a train station is nothing more than the actual temple of journey and intercultural exchange. See you next time.

Just as a confirmation of my almost-insane unpredictability, it’s been one whole day that I’ve been listening to a single song in my apartment; the song is Under the Red Sky by Bob Dylan. And, of course, there’s no particular reason for this choice, except for its high-level music background and the trademark voice and lyrics of the real Rock Minstrel. Have a nice listening to it.

I am just on a period of serious thinking. I’ve been living here in the Netherlands for almost a year and I have to start thinking to what I actually want to do in the coming months. As you already know, my stay here in Groningen is expected to last at least until August 2010, then we’ll see – and, in any case, it will probably be just a decision only of mine.
The decision will be subjected to five key questions:

1. Can I still keep on going in front of a computer, 40 hours a week, without becoming insane?
2. How about the well-known sabbatical year I always wanted to have?
3. Last but not least, do I really want to keep living here in the Netherlands? And in case I don’t, where else could I go?

In my mind maybe there’s already an answer for each of these questions, even if I can’t really claim any sort of certainty. I just have to wait for the right time, not so far from now, in order to announce my choice to the public, keeping in mind that time is never enough and I still have a lot of things I would like to do in my life. In the meantime, the long trip of my life keeps on going.

Sometimes I think that all the things they told me during my infancy about the respect for the people, equality of human beings, and so on, were just a load of nonsense. I get seriously convinced of this when I see the display of a useless and sick nationalistic pride every time a poor man with an Army uniform dies in war (yes, now we’re talking about a war), something that obviously doesn’t happen when the one who dies is just a man without a uniform. And if the dead man is a foreigner, especially when poor, sans papier and looking for new fortunes like the several hundred people who died when traversing the Sicily Channel (a submarine cemetery, I would say), then he becomes just part of a mere number. Fifty, one hundred, two hundreds: numbers announced by the media as lightly as the latest Lotto draw.

The right-wing braggarts would probably answer by citing the “patriotic spirit” and declaring that they have “died for the Nation”. The only people who really died for the Nation are actually the Italian partisans during the World War II, surely not the soldiers who were sent in a faraway Central Asian country for a mission which probably can’t be won, and surely they’re not there to defend the “Nation” from the invaders. Just once, let’s quit all of these fake peace missions and use good sense, and let the Italian solders come back home to their familiers.

We always need to show respect – as long as we can – to people who die.

But sincerely I am not willing to join the band of incompetent Italian politicians who show emotion for the death of six soldiers who have found themselves in a war place with the understanding and the conscience of all the dangers around, even defining them “heroes”, a word with no real meaning at all in nowadays’ Italy. I have never felt the same indignation for all those people who die at work, on car accidents or, to be fair, even the 131 Canadian soldiers who died in Afghanistan.

And please don’t say it’s just because they were “our” soldiers, they were Italians. Italy is already a meta-nation and even those 131 soldiers were human beings; politicians trying to create false heroes only according to what’s written in the front page of their passport are just applying a discriminatory approach, and certainly they’ll never be “heroes” for me.