“I edit my posts for a while after they’re posted”

– Jago Noja

it is no measure of health to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society
— krishnamurti

I keep having these thoughts, like being all for the animals and stop caring for anything else in the world except caring for the animals, defending the animals, vindicating the animals of all the pain inflicted to them. How comforting would be not to have other issues then. My place among the others, the future of the others, the war, the fake wars. All the rest, the job the parents the loves. Just the animals, just because they’re the weakest most endangered thing alive around and they look a little like us and they can save my soul.
It was the same with certain spiritual or political ideas just the other day. Nothing is real except the anguish which creates everything.
I know it would never work, like say being all for the people and socialism and about injustice and all like that, like my brother who would despise my being for the animals or the plants and not for the poor and the laborer.
I don’t go for the absolutes and I get bored and confused when i try to put together things so irreconcilable like billions of humans eating the planet out and the rest of the things alive. Make out the puzzle and you’ll only see what you knew already, everything eating everything out forever.

So I say, just forget it, it wouldn’t drag me down to my real problems anyway.
I had three very hard months life is a mess as usual and I still have to come out of it. I wish I had the strength or the will or the faith in words to try to tell about it, and stop thinking about new funny ways to commit suicide or be forgotten and become a hobo. I don’t know yet if I am going upward or downward. Years later. My hope is so young yet I am no longer a boy but a man decaying. A caveman decaying. I don’t know a soul who would forgive me for being what I am and also not being able to tell about it. Etc.

“Only the paranoid survives”
— some guy from Intel corp.

I’m unplugging myself from this blog. I wish I wasn’t, but I just have to. The thing has been ruined, and I can’t do anything to avoid this. I mean, I tried. I really did. I know that this is likely to be another thing I will regret tomorrow.

Yet, here we are. A new blog of mine is going to be opened somewhere else, with a new name & graphics. This one will be stripped of all the personal stuff, and I don’t know what will be of it. It may produce new material, you know, like a boring column about the falling country, or it may sleep forever from now on. It won’t be the same thing anyhow. Completely in the opposite direction, actually.

I’m not going to publish the address of the new blog, unfortunately. I just can’t. I hope you will understand. First of all the new blog ain’t ready yet, second of all I don’t want to be traced, see. I want to dissolve and disappear against the background of blogland. I don’t want to be followed because I can’t afford it.
If you think that this is unfair, put yourself in my shoes. I am not getting any new readers. I am dropping them all.

Actually, this is not accurate, because I promised to some of you the new address, and I think I will keep my word. Also, if anyone else wants the address, you can just write me an email. To my discretion, I may pass you the address, or I may not. For all of you, anyway, there will be a transition period during which you will just have to wait.
Please do know that I am terribly sorry for all this. I am heartbroken, actually.

You know, this blog was going to be one year old in two weeks. It covered quite some road, gathered strength thanks to you all. This is the worst thing that could happen to it, the most wasteful, and it’s happening.

Holy shit!

I am not going over the reasons once again. I made a mistake, and I can’t write what I want anymore. Real life got mixed with its cyber dramatization, so to speak. On top of this, someone just made it all the more stupid and bitter by harassing my feelings about the whole thing, and my feelings are important to me.

Now it feels weird, like I don’t know if I am sober or drunk. Oh, doesn’t matter. It is all for the best. Just in case, I’ll see you all privately. You have my email.

If it was closing time now I’d simply ask you to kindly step forward and please reach for the exit, that the cashier isn’t working but the doors are closing already. Yet the truth is that it’s me the one who’s going away. So I’ll just say, thank you, forever thank you guys. Much love to you all.

I pass the italian border in the early evening, surprised to see how Italy looks good and well-kept after all the eastern urban landscapes, even the richest ones. The first railways stations look old and burdened with a rich, intriguing past. When I get off the train in Mestre, though, in the hope to find a connection that isn’t there, the inexplicable dirtiness of everything, pavements, seats, windows, wastebaskets, lines; the loud noise of the city traffic; the triviality and violent indifference of the people: it all suggests me what I was missing from the train window. Italy is always a bluff.

So, anyway, no good connection at this hour, I jump on the first train to Venice from Mestre, to do once again that good ol’ 10 minutes ride. I’ll have to find an accommodation in Venice, something I obviously never did during the years I lived there, and it feels weird and wrong. A sad sign of my having lost contact with the city.
But it’s incredibly easy, I must say, to just step into a two stars decent hotel near the station of Venice and get me a cheap room with bathroom, with a window on a narrow calle from where venetian voices come. It’s the cheapest hotel of the entire trip, actually, which is kind of stunning.

How much I love this town, I can’t say. Tonight the sky is all starry, as very often happens here, the streets are filled with tourists, the air is windy and pleasurable. Clusters of italians outside the bars are watching the championship match, and later I will find them partying in the streets, where improvised musical ensembles play loudly. Venetians, sometimes so boring or rude, seem magnificent tonight, in their being always the same, a little greedy, a little absent minded, full of life and pride. Doing business, making jokes, wandering about, alluring tourists into restaurants, they always have that air of knowing better and caring less. I never actually liked them, with their sing-song accent, a little childish, their women always angry at something and disappointed. But it’s good to respect them, tolerate them and being accepted by them. This is a small city, it’s one of the most beautiful and incredible city in the world, it’s a rotting-down museum, and people still live in it, collecting garbage and selling fruits from the boats as they did for centuries.
I feel at home in this city. Maybe it’s because of all the tourists, because they don’t know. I wish this was a homecoming and the rambling was ending here tonight.

I take all the shortcuts to St. Marco square. I want to see the basin and hear once again the foolish orchestras playing. I take an actual round of the city, passing the Accademia, Santa Margherita square and some of the other places where students meet at night. I drink glasses of wine here and there, eating the so tasty venetian tramezzini. I look at the girls, all of them. I sit on one of the benches in San Polo square, near where I lived once. I lay down on it because of the starry night and I remember many things I don’t want to remember tonight, not in detail. They just show their faces in my mind for a while, their old smell and that air of having irreparably happened.

I just lay there for a while, looking at all the endless variety of human figures strolling the streets of this city, glowing in the yellow light of the shop windows. I think at some of the people I’ve looked at around during this trip.

The fifty years old woman who picked flowers from the beds in front of Budapest Keleti station, making a bundle with them in a piece of colored paper she had with her; Always at Keleti station, the guy endlessly singing his song with a guitar and a powerful, moving voice, unconcerned of all the drunks fighting and arguing around him, as the swallows flew by over people’s heads crying their high calls, above the open grave of the metro station; The old crazy lady dragging two armchairs down the streets in Budapest, stuck against the obstacle of a high curb, whom I helped out, without a word, while she kept thanking me, with the word I couldn’t recognize yet; The bookshop in the center of Budapest where a hungarian writer was presenting his latest book, and as I stopped to look at his back on the other side of the shop window, everyone among his group of listeners looked at me until he turned to see who it was; The young B. whom I met on the train from Trieste, and who relieved me out of my dark thoughts like a random, casual angel, and with whom I talked of loves, delusions, dreams and accidents (I lost your email, B.! Write me!).

And together with the people, during the trip were the birds, the many trees, and all the memorable smells that won the smell of cars and cement, like heavenly gifts, like the smell of fishes and vegetables at that indoor market in Budapest.
I haven’t taken a single picture or a single sample from all of this, and as I lay on the bench in St. Polo square I know that all the souvenirs in my mind will be fading soon as if sunk in a big sea, or in the Venice lagoon, and that I will be able to get hold of just bits of it, as it must be. But that’s the way I like it. I think the rambling really ended tonight, after all.

I have to leave for Ljubljana in the morning. As I wake up and get out of bed, at seven thirty, Gabrielle T. is already out of the house to her job at the ministry. She left me the ingredients for a breakfast in sight upon the table, the house keys, and as I bustle about in the bright kitchen I try to mentally write the thank you message I will leave her. I know she deserves more than a formal thank you. If my attitude would allow me to, if I was a more open or easygoing fellow, I know I would like to be a friend for her, for real.
Then I find a piece of paper and I come up with something like this:

Dear Gabrielle,
Thank you again for your hospitality and for being what you are. Not only it takes guts, and a good deal of trust in people to just pick up someone from the streets and give him a bed; but also, you must know you inspire the same trust into the others and this is really something. I, for instance, normally don’t have that much trust in people left to spare.
I swear I’ll come to visit your café in France, as I promised you, maybe after the summer. Love, etc.
p.s. Vive le rien – Hasta el nada, siempre!

The voyage to Ljubljana is long and tedious as the one from Budapest to Zagreb. Eastern Europe trains go slow, making a lot of stops. The landscape is gorgeous anyway, as the mountains and forests of Slovenia reveals themselves. At the border I get my passport stamped another time, quite unreasonably. As a EU privileged citizen I could be traveling without passport in Slovenia.

I have four hours to spend in Ljubljana before my connection to Venice. After a little wandering about, I find a restaurant open. The restaurant hasn’t much to eat apart of meat, as usual, and once again I can transgress my vegetarian propositions. There are many Italians at the tables next to mine, mostly suits from small ventures in town for business. The pronounces are from the Veneto region, the faces either honest and hard working, with clever eyes ruthless and gentle at the same time, or completely mafia style, bossy, without any sparkle of interest for the surrounding world and devoted to business.

I wonder how these people of mine look from the outside, to non-Italian eyes. I know there’s some charm in them, aside of all the annoying stuff, that I fail to grasp because I am too accustomed to it. Yet I know I am different from them, not just for the way I look, the things I do or don’t do. Or the sheer fact that I am alone.
I know they are Italians more than me, and that without them or other people like them, here in Ljubljana June 2006 I’d be stateless. Their identities, their personalities, their awareness is what make my difference possible, although unnecessary. We have a language in common, we share a handful of television programs, schools and politicians’ names, euphemisms, provincialisms. These are called our ‘roots’, our ‘culture’, the remains of it. There isn’t much else.
I speak in English with the waiter, although his Italian is quite perfect. I don’t know if I have any regret for any of these Italian uniforms I missed, whether I am the lucky or the unlucky one.

I am not even aware that Italy’s going to play against Ghana at the World Championship tonight, until I overhear a guy at the next table talking about it.

“Will you come to see the match at my place?” he’s saying to his colleague.
“What match?”
“Oh my god, Italia against Ghana, that match!”
“Uh. Wait, what’s that, the World Championship?”
“Jesus, how can you not be knowing that?”
“Don’t be so Italian.”

That’s my people, I guess. I see more samples of it around the nice center of the city, biding my time. Couples of tourists arrived with their caravans, others on bicycles, and few more teams of business men and women sipping their espressos at the outside tables of crowded bars.
A woman from Ljubljana, who spontaneously offers to give me directions to a working ATM, says Slovenians appreciate very much Italians. “They’re very nice people”.
I’ve been knowing for a while that in our strange times everybody can be wrong all of the time, despite what Abe said. So my alienation from my own country, that’s wrong too, easily.

We are talking about our travels, so I mostly listen to Gabrielle T. as she lists all the places she visited, and all the things she did managing to be a mother of three children and, as she says, a famous politician in France. “I am actually very well known in my country” she tells me, like I wouldn’t believe it. “You would be surprised.”
She doesn’t know I can believe everything anyway, because I am always a toy in the hands of my imagination. Looking at her, it however seems possible.

We are sitting in a restaurant in Zagreb, under a pergola. From inside the restaurant comes the usual dull keyboard sound and all around us customers sit at their tables eating in silence. The risotto with mixed seafood we ordered takes us occupied for a while.

“I’ve been in the United States once,” I say to her, trying to look interesting. “You know, for a few months, traveling around…”
“I would never go to the United States!” She says. “Never!” She stresses her point with a ironic gesture of her fist, shaken up and down.
“Yeah, my mother says the same thing. Not attracted at all. But it is a beautiful country.”
“Oh, I can imagine.” she says, meaning that there is no way she can be convinced to go there, and that the giving up is worthed anyway.
“You may not like many things of them, but sure they have a beautiful land,” I propose. I know I am slightly annoying her with this, but I think that she can take it. “They have a beautiful language too,” I add.
“I hate English language. American especially. For me it’s just work.”
“I like it, and I like their literature. And just think about their music. Well, you can’t see everything under a political light, do you?”
“Everything is political.”

Oh, how I hate that phrase. I’ve heard it too many times. And so we are going to talk politics. After all a part of me wants to, more than she does probably, because I need to challenge a communist whenever I find one, not that it makes me happy. I just have to.

“So do you believe in a upcoming global revolution?” I ask her.
“Yes, I do. I think it is going to happen.”
“Yeah, maybe islamists will do it, ’cause they’re the only ones who are opposing western nations, but not to build communism, you know? They have quite fascist states in mind.”
“Communism it’s an idea, it can live longer”
“The problem with communists is that they want everybody to think just like them,” I’m saying at a certain point. “You know, it might be a commonplace, but there must be something into it after all. I wish communists took into consideration individual freedom more.”
“Do you think that the world you live in is free?” Gabrielle T. asks. “Are the cities free or in the hands of global brands, banks and corporations? Are the people really free to travel, or just to be tourists or immigrants? Are we free to think or are we manipulated by the global media?”
“You can’t use others’ flaws to justify your own. Global market and capitalism are flawed, evil, but this doesn’t justify the alternatives to be flawed as well, at least in theory. Otherwise I don’t see what the alternative is. Just like it was no excuse to Stalin if Hitler and Mussolini also sized Poland or deported people and used a network of spies against their own citizens.”
“That was not the real communism!” Gabrielle T. says. “I am not here to defend Stalin, I have a different idea of what communism must be!”
“Yet it is written that communism is a dictatorship! Either you rewrite Marx, or you change the name of your ideology, because as it is communism is meant as a dictatorship!”

We go on like this for a while, people from nearby tables turn to look at us as we raise our voices, and then the argument settles down. We haven’t lost our good humor while arguing, and the evening remains pleasant, but it suddenly becomes clear that going on like this would move us away one from the other without a good reason. That’s just another evidence of how much politics divide people, whereas disregard for politics does no harm.

Walking away from the restaurant and down to her place, we look at the city preparing for the night. In the main square downtown, a set of majorettes makes us smile of the sweet silliness, the useless and elegant, provincial skills of their choreography. I drop casual remarks about how all the city centers look identical because of the presence of brands all around. Gabrielle T. nods in assent, but she’s obviously wondering why in the hell I am saying this now. As a matter of fact I don’t know, because although I am certain of what I don’t want politically or socially (almost anything) I have no idea of what I want instead, and so I can understand all positions and no position at the same time. I can challenge everyone’s position and I can’t propose any alternative.

Then I am into bed in a room at the end of a long corridor. A huge wardrobe makes the room smaller. Gabrielle T., on the other side of the apartment, is working on her papers for a presentation. I try to sleep without conviction. The real question is why do I get passionate about politics, communism and all that stuff? I know why. It’s all personal. It’s all because communism was the name behind the authority my father used against me, since when I was a little kid. That’s all. This isn’t something you can explain easily, but I wish I could.

I am anguished to get to Zagreb. I imagine the hostility or the evilness of the unknown, its closeness looming behind station walls. When I get down of the train, unwillingly, and walk onto the large garden street, it’s 1 pm, hot weather, inhaling dust, everyone is greeted by someone else, even the tourists. A tram rails by in front of the station, few pedestrians walk by.
I suddenly know it is not the case to be anguished by the unknown, but probably by the too well known and boring.
Coming from Budapest the city appears as another version of a southern rich Swiss city, divided between the industrious plains and beautiful mountains of woods and villas. In the city it is all very well kept, clean, renewed, anonymous. If only it had a lake it would be Lugano.

It’s sunday, the city is slow, well-mannered, the shop are closed, the embassies and ministries on the way to the old city are closed too, and the flags rest in the unmoving midday hot air. Birds sing all around from the trees, as they do in Budapest. Wherever trees are, birds know what to do, I guess.

In the central square of Zagreb it is all close. On a glass door it’s written that the Tourist Informations Office will be closed for the rest of the day. I keep walking around. There aren’t many hotels although bars are everywhere
This is how I meet Gabrielle T. on the streets. I am asking directions for a not too expansive hotel nearby to an elderly extremely kind couple. They are discussing about it when Gabrielle T. emerges from the background and asks me if I am looking for a hotel, because she knows a cheap one. She’s a 50 years old woman, short blond hair and thick-framed glasses, with a very kind and ironic smile. She says she can show me the way to the hotel, so I wave off to the couple and walk away with her.
In few steps down the road I learn that she’s from France, she works for an important international organization (very important) as a financial adviser; also that she collects memorabilia from the USSR era. She shows me one of the pieces she bought in the morning at the local antique fair. It’s a little white marble bust that fits into her pocket.
I also learn that the hotel is nearby but if I want I can sleep at her place, ’cause her apartment is big and she lives alone. I learn that Croatians are hard to deal with in her job, but not as Bulgarians were, although Sofia is the most beautiful city she ever visited. I learn that she worked in Kosovo and many other places. She was around a lot.

“You know, when I was young I traveled a lot by myself, particularly in the east”, she says. She seems very sure of herself, and yet she doesn’t look directly at you speaking as if she is going to tell it anyway even if you don’t listen. It’s a sign of bashfulness I suppose.
“I was always so happy to find such an hospitality there”, she’s saying, “when people you asked directions to invited you to sleep at their place, just like that. So I know how it is when you travel alone. How much that hospitality means” We are entering her apartment at this point, which is nice, bright, messy and huge. “I got plenty of space here, so, really, it’s up to you”
I know I am going to accept her invite. Not because I can’t afford a hotel, or I have one of my attacks of stinginess. It’s because a extraordinary fact is happening, this spontaneous reception of strangers that was normal in the old days and now it’s not anymore. I only don’t know how to say “yes thank you!”, spontaneously, so I mumble something that could be ‘you’re very kind, thank you’, while I give my name and we have a formal presentation, the dull “nice to meet you” exchange that luckily we manage to keep in the ironic realm.

While preparing the coffee, Gabrielle T. makes me notice the big Lenin bust on the cupboard in the large dining room.
“I’m a communist”, she says, “you must know that.”
“Really?” I say. I feel I must tell her what I make of it before it’s too late. “I am an anti-communist instead” I tell her with a smile. “You know, I know communists very well, it’s my personal story.”
“It doesn’t matter” she says.

My last night in Budapest, it was raining, it was cold. I had been walking around all day. The next morning it was going to be the early train to Zagreb but, being my last day in Budapest, despite the rain I moved closer to the center.
I took the wrong path, then the wrong tram, then finally the right path again and after an hour I was still walking under the rain, freezing, my feet burning, still directed downtown.
I wanted the people, the bars, some animation, hear voices, see faces.

Then I started to talk with God in english, you know, those kind of things you do when you’re alone. “It’s my last night in the city. Aren’t you gonna make me meet an hungarian woman tonight?”
You know, I didn’t want to have sex or anything. I’m just imagining some talking, listening, unexpected meeting with unexpected people of the opposite sex. They say you make new friends when you travel alone, but it’s not so true. At least not anymore. You do, if you pick them in the same category you are from (tourists meeting each other in the hotels). Otherwise there are certain barriers, and then everything seems to disappear from you hands as soon as you leave.

Half way downtown, the shape of St. Stephen cathedral appeared in the haze and it was unreal, fantastic in the frayed glowing of the streetlights under the rain. Nobody was around. All the places were closed. After a while, I talked with God again.
“Would you give me a dry bench instead?”
(pause)
“No! Forget what I just said! I’d still prefer the woman if possible!” This must have pissed God. I knew it, so I tried to haggle, making things worse.
“Let’s say that if you give me the dry bench I’ll know you are not going to give me the woman?”

Next thing I knew, at the bus stop of the 56 there was a dry bench. I sat on it, disconsolate. I rested my feet and resumed walking after a while, hoping that maybe God had decided to give me both the dry bench and the woman anyway. See, I am an optimist.
I also thought that probably real hobos have this sort of conversations all the time. They never get the company. Only sometimes, the dry bench.

Then, down along the riverfront, walking by all the big hotels, I finally had beautiful Hungarian women throwing themselves at me.
“Hey! where are you going?”
“Nowhere, just walking”
“Wouldn’t you like some company?”
“What do you mean?” When my feet are burning, my mind is particularly slow.
“Where are you from?”
“Italy.”
“Oh, Italy! How nice! Now, what about a nice hotel room and some company?”

You know, I never went with a prostitute in my life. I don’t think I ever will, unless I get really desperate. That night, rebuffing prostitute calls all the way to the central bridge, I really thought God was making fun of me. “You read that thing on the blog about Hungarian women, did you?” I asked him.
But, you know, there are many who reads you but never publicly admit that they do, even if they get ideas from what you write. God is just one of them.

Finally I had reached the center, after all. It was all closed down except for the tourist-trap night clubs. I walked all the way back to the hotel and it never stopped raining. The next morning I was directed to Zagreb, on a train that left the bitter and sweet city of Budapest right on time.

— p.s. thanks to you all who are commenting and sending emails to me these days. I’ll answer you all as soon as i get back in Milan. Promise.

Places have to be different by the one you know already. Lacking of superior talents in seeing and understanding, the average tired tourist –like I am being here– should be at least compelled to search for anything that is different from what is already known. The more different, the better. Because cities and cultures have many strategies to organize themselves, so why assuming that one is better than another?
I don’t appreciate very much all the things that make a city like Budapest similar to a city like Milan. Turkish Kebaps, Pizzerias, traffic, supermarkets, fashion brands, cell phones, sedan taxicabs, FIAT cars, the mafia of the public pissoirs raising money from your peeing, etc.

But among the things that are different, the most sweet in Budapest is the language. The sound of Hungarian language is so particular it is hard to find anything similar to compare it with. At first it may sound similar to a Slavic idiom, but it is a completely different thing.
Some syllable, here and there, sounds even Italian. ‘Italian’ is ‘olasz’ in Hungarian, by the way. Don’t ask me why. It may come from ‘oil’, you know, olives. I don’t know.

My first day in Budapest I bought a Magyar-Olasz vocabulary. I always feel obliged to at least try to stammer some word in the local language, just to let them know I don’t take it for granted that they speak English. I studied two or three of those words walking around looking for a hotel on my first day.

Now I can say “Jó napot” to say good morning, “Jó estét” to say good evening, and, most important, “köszönöm” to say “thank you” (see if this is similar to any language you know). “Goodbye” is still too difficult to pronounce for a simple dyslexic like me. ‘Viszontlátásra’ is beyond my reach.
Anyway, it’s a pleasure to hear this language spoken, maybe by two women chatting at the tram stop. Very often they seem to have a tender and caring attitude one with the other, very affectionate. And their language is the better music possible to this.

** what I really wanted to talk about in this post was the round sweet profile of Hungarian women’s hips that so perfectly complete their long legs as they elegantly walk by, chanting for you their mute song as you walk by, but, you know, I reckon I must be a little too much fixated here. All right, I want to be loved by some Hungarian woman, what do you want. I can’t help it.

Budapest. Third day in the city. The city is actually wonderful.

I come out from the indoor market in Ráckóczi ter, where customers wait their turn in patient lines, vegetables in their hands personally picked from the large crates piled in the market. The clouds seem to be giving room for disbanded sun rays filtering through (it rained all morning). Near the large brownish river the wind comes along cooler and wet, shaking the top end of the small trees. People climb up and down the yellow trams that go across the river. I enter the folk music shop, where the manager gives me to listen a quarter of hour of amazing CDs I’ll end up buying. The violin virtuoso, the traditional folk band, the recent folk band, the pop-folk-experimental ensemble of the seventies, the traditional gypsy music & dance ensemble. That sort of things. Folk music must be that kind of thing on which nobody can teach Hungarians a lesson.

( On the other hand, I went to the Buda castle musem yesterday, and it consisted in a gigantic boredom of Hungarian painters of all ages, imitating European schools all the way. There I fell asleep on a soft armchair on the top floor, where the contemporary Hungarian artists are. I closed my eyes, the buzzing of the museum faded away, and I dreamed I did find a word to define the feeling of impotence and shame that takes me when I don’t do things, worried to fail. Like approaching the stunning girl I kept seeing around in the museum, for instance, instead of just looking at her like an idiot. Why there isn’t a definition for such a precise feeling? )

Outside. I know I said I was not interested in architecture but the streets of Budapest, or at least the old bits of it, are quite superior to anything you can see, say in Prague or in Salzburg or cities like that. The reason is that not everything is renewed here, nor too much rich and well-kept, but it is used, so the streets, despite all the cars and the shops, seem to have a soul, I mean a character. Or at least a age. Renewal of old urban architectures may be good to make money, but it is also quite depressing.

The people here seem to be proud, reserved and yet easygoing. They seem to be smart but also understanding, as if they knew all the weight of the world. I probably am not understanding anything of it all.
I love to make eye contacts with Hungarian women, although the chatting hasn’t brought me anywhere so far. I talked for a while with a woman at the folk fair (buying a long silk skirt and shirt with her help. You know, the fucking presents), and for few seconds with a very young girl at the Buda castle, at night, among all the kissing of lovers. That’s about all the talking I had here, it was nice and nothing remains of it.

There are actually women for any taste around, the short, the fat, the giraffe, the Diane Keaton type, the Meryl Streep type, the supermodel, the spiritual, the impossible. I don’t seem to be able to think at much apart of sex these days.

Wien doesn’t want me today. After one night at the mediocre “clima hotel” I am kicked out. All hotels in town are overbooked, for some conference or congress. After the fourth overbooked hotel I walk in, it’s time to get to the station. Without regrets I buy the ticket to Budapest and leave the city in the early afternoon, after a brief walk to the center and some resting on the large lawn near the museum of arts and the imperial palace. I am not attracted by Wien.
From the lawn I looked at the carriages for tourists, with horses in pairs, wondering how it comes that a former student of History of Arts can avoid museums and churches entirely.

There is something with rich European cities that is reassuring and disappointing at the same time: you can have no respect for them, because they are in too good a shape, to well-behaved and spoiled and cleaned. This can be relaxing as well as annoying.

The trip to Budapest from Wien takes four hours, during which the Austrian mountain scenery fades into the Hungarian uniform plains. The view from the window reminds me inevitably of the prairies I come from, in northern Italy, although the villages look older and poorer.

A silly music is aired as we pass the border, to welcome us in the Hungarian railways. The Hungarian policeman seems relieved to discover I am neither German, Austrian or American. In fact, there are many Americans on the train as, I will learn later, there are in the city. Almost every tourist you see around is north-American.
I wonder why. Maybe is there a Scientology Congress in Buda?
As we enter the station, I am finally glad I’m here. I only hope the city is not a tourist machine, despite all the Americans.